Fake News Websites

24/11/2021

Fake News have been around us for a long time. With the sudden rise of social media and influx ofinformation from various sources most people can not differentiate a truth from a lie. In this thesis,we approach this problem, focusing in Portuguese news websites. We try to find key elements thatdistinguish real news websites from fake websites. In this thesis, we proposed a system capable ofdistinguish trustworthy websites from websites that spread fake, non verified news. The system startsby receiving an url. Then an http request is made and the system tries to find the sub-page with theweb news site information. That page is processed and information is extracted. The system alsofinds other features, like the country localization and the provider. After gathering the features, theevaluator calculates the website score by giving a weight to each feature, marking the website as fakeor trustworthy.We created a data set with fake and trustworthy websites to test our system.We evaluated our system with different machine learning algorithms and concluded that the mostimportant features are the country that they are hosted and the security protocol.

Autores da comunidade :

• 

  D

  Diogo Miguel Ferreira Pinheiro

  ist178208

Orientadores desta instituição:

• 

  M

  Maria Luísa Torres Ribeiro Marques da Silva Coheur

  ist24630

• 

  J

  João Paulo Baptista de Carvalho

  ist14039

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

eng - Inglês

Instituto Superior Técnico