Towards improved fake news detection using a hybrid RoBERTa and metadata enhanced XGBoost model

The widespread dissemination of misinformation on online platforms has become a significant societal challenge, influencing public opinion, political landscapes, and social stability. Traditional rule-based and statistical methods for fake news classification often struggle to generalize across different datasets due to the evolving nature of misinformation. To address this, deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques have emerged as effective solutions for detecting deceptive content. In this study, a novel fake news classification framework is proposed, integrating Transformer-based feature extraction with an XGBoost classifier. The methodology leverages RoBERTa embeddings, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF)-based tokenization, and metadata processing to capture both linguistic and contextual cues essential for accurate classification. The model is trained and evaluated on the PolitiFact and GossipCop datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 0.9930 and 0.9764, respectively. Comparative analysis with existing methods demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in improving precision, recall, and F1-score. The findings underscore the importance of combining deep learning-based feature extraction with ensemble learning techniques for robust and scalable fake news detection.