Biblio
People connect with a plethora of information from many online portals due to the availability and ease of access to the internet and electronic communication devices. However, news portals sometimes abuse press freedom by manipulating facts. Most of the time, people are unable to discriminate between true and false news. It is difficult to avoid the detrimental impact of Bangla fake news from spreading quickly through online channels and influencing people’s judgment. In this work, we investigated many real and false news pieces in Bangla to discover a common pattern for determining if an article is disseminating incorrect information or not. We developed a deep learning model that was trained and validated on our selected dataset. For learning, the dataset contains 48,678 legitimate news and 1,299 fraudulent news. To deal with the imbalanced data, we used random undersampling and then ensemble to achieve the combined output. In terms of Bangla text processing, our proposed model achieved an accuracy of 98.29% and a recall of 99%.
Currently, the Dark Web is one key platform for the online trading of illegal products and services. Analysing the .onion sites hosting marketplaces is of interest for law enforcement and security researchers. This paper presents a study on 123k listings obtained from 6 different Dark Web markets. While most of current works leverage existing datasets, these are outdated and might not contain new products, e.g., those related to the 2020 COVID pandemic. Thus, we build a custom focused crawler to collect the data. Being able to conduct analyses on current data is of considerable importance as these marketplaces continue to change and grow, both in terms of products offered and users. Also, there are several anti-crawling mechanisms being improved, making this task more difficult and, consequently, reducing the amount of data obtained in recent years on these marketplaces. We conduct a data analysis evaluating multiple characteristics regarding the products, sellers, and markets. These characteristics include, among others, the number of sales, existing categories in the markets, the origin of the products and the sellers. Our study sheds light on the products and services being offered in these markets nowadays. Moreover, we have conducted a case study on one particular productive and dynamic drug market, i.e., Cannazon. Our initial goal was to understand its evolution over time, analyzing the variation of products in stock and their price longitudinally. We realized, though, that during the period of study the market suffered a DDoS attack which damaged its reputation and affected users' trust on it, which was a potential reason which lead to the subsequent closure of the market by its operators. Consequently, our study provides insights regarding the last days of operation of such a productive market, and showcases the effectiveness of a potential intervention approach by means of disrupting the service and fostering mistrust.
The rise of social media has brought the rise of fake news and this fake news comes with negative consequences. With fake news being such a huge issue, efforts should be made to identify any forms of fake news however it is not so simple. Manually identifying fake news can be extremely subjective as determining the accuracy of the information in a story is complex and difficult to perform, even for experts. On the other hand, an automated solution would require a good understanding of NLP which is also complex and may have difficulties producing an accurate output. Therefore, the main problem focused on this project is the viability of developing a system that can effectively and accurately detect and identify fake news. Finding a solution would be a significant benefit to the media industry, particularly the social media industry as this is where a large proportion of fake news is published and spread. In order to find a solution to this problem, this project proposed the development of a fake news identification system using deep learning and natural language processing. The system was developed using a Word2vec model combined with a Long Short-Term Memory model in order to showcase the compatibility of the two models in a whole system. This system was trained and tested using two different dataset collections that each consisted of one real news dataset and one fake news dataset. Furthermore, three independent variables were chosen which were the number of training cycles, data diversity and vector size to analyze the relationship between these variables and the accuracy levels of the system. It was found that these three variables did have a significant effect on the accuracy of the system. From this, the system was then trained and tested with the optimal variables and was able to achieve the minimum expected accuracy level of 90%. The achieving of this accuracy levels confirms the compatibility of the LSTM and Word2vec model and their capability to be synergized into a single system that is able to identify fake news with a high level of accuracy.
ISSN: 2640-0146