Introduction: Analyzing Fake News with Transformers

We were all born thinking that the Earth was flat. As babies, we crawled on flat surfaces. As kindergarten children, we played on flat playgrounds. In elementary school, we sat in flat classrooms.

Then, our parents and teachers told us that the Earth was round and that the people on the other side of it were upside down. It took us quite a while to understand why they did not fall off the Earth. Even today, when we see a beautiful sunset, we still see the “sun set,” and not the Earth rotating away from the sun!

It takes time and effort to figure out what is fake news and what isn’t. Like children, we have to work our way through something we perceive as fake news.

Chapter overview

This chapter will tackle some controversial topics that lead to tense debates. We will check the facts on topics such as climate change and video game ratings. We will analyze social media posts and other sources of information.

Our goal is certainly not to judge anybody or anything. Fake news involves both opinions and facts. News often depends on the perception of facts by local culture. We will provide ideas and tools to help others gather more information on a topic and find their own way in the jungle of information we receive daily.

We will be focusing on ethical methods, not the performance of transformers. We will not be using a GPT-3 engine for this reason. Our goal is to showcase how transformers can be used to educate users, not to lecture them. This approach is our opinion, not a fact! We are not replacing human judgment. Instead, we are providing tools for humans to make their own judgments manually. GPT-3 engines have attained human-level performance for many tasks. However, we should leave moral and ethical decision-making to humans.

Therefore, first, we will begin by defining the path that leads us to react emotionally and rationally to fake news.

We will then define some methods to identify fake news with transformers and heuristics.

We will be using the resources we built in the previous chapters to understand and explain fake news.

This chapter covers the following topics: