Abstract: Fake news has altered society in negative ways as evidenced in politics and culture. It has adversely affected both online social network systems as well as offline communities and conversations. Using automatic fake news detection algorithms is an efficient way to combat the rampant dissemination of fake news. However, using an effective dataset has been a problem for fake news research and detection model development. In this paper, we present Fakeddit, a novel dataset consisting of about 800,000 samples from multiple categories of fake news. Each sample is labeled according to 2-way, 3-way, and 5-way classification categories. Prior fake news datasets do not provide multimodal text and image data, metadata, comment data, and fine-grained fake news categorization at this scale and breadth. We construct hybrid text+image models and perform extensive experiments for multiple variations of classification.

Introduction: Within our progressively digitized society, the spread of fake news and misinformation has enlarged, leading to many problems such as an increasingly politically divisive climate. The dissemination and consequences of fake news are exacerbating partly due to the rise of popular social media applications with inadequate fact-checking or third-party filtering, enabling any individual to broadcast fake news easily and at a large scale BIBREF0. Though steps have been taken to detect and eliminate fake news, it still poses a dire threat to society BIBREF1. As such, research in the area of fake news detection is essential. To build any machine learning model, one must obtain good training data for the specified task. In the realm of fake news detection, there are several existing published datasets. However, they have several limitations: limited size, modality, and/or granularity. Though fake news may immediately be thought of as taking the form of text, it can appear in other mediums such as images. As such, it is important that standard fake news detection systems detect all types of fake news and not just text data. Our dataset will expand fake news research into the multimodal space and allow researchers to develop stronger fake news detection systems. Our contributions to the study of fake news detection are: We create a large-scale multimodal fake news dataset consisting of around 800,000 samples containing text, image, metadata, and comments data from a highly diverse set of resources. Each data sample consists of multiple labels, allowing users to utilize the dataset for 2-way, 3-way, and 5-way classification. This enables both high-level and fine-grained fake news classification. We evaluate our dataset through text, image, and text+image modes with a neural network architecture that integrates both the image and text data. We run experiments for several types of models, providing a comprehensive overview of classification results.

Question: What classification tasks do they experiment on?
Answer: They experiment on 3 types of classification tasks with different inputs:
2-way: True/False
3-way: True/False news with text true in real world/False news with false text
5-way: True/Parody/Missleading/Imposter/False Connection