Examining the Mental Health Impact of Misinformation on Social Media Using a Hybrid Transformer-Based Approach

Social media has significantly reshaped interpersonal communication, fostering connectivity while also enabling the proliferation of misinformation. The unchecked spread of false narratives has profound effects on mental health, contributing to increased stress, anxiety, and misinformation-driven paranoia. This study presents a hybrid transformer-based approach using a RoBERTa-LSTM classifier to detect misinformation, assess its impact on mental health, and classify disorders linked to misinformation exposure. The proposed models demonstrate accuracy rates of 98.4, 87.8, and 77.3 in detecting misinformation, mental health implications, and disorder classification, respectively. Furthermore, Pearson's Chi-Squared Test for Independence (p-value = 0.003871) validates the direct correlation between misinformation and deteriorating mental well-being. This study underscores the urgent need for better misinformation management strategies to mitigate its psychological repercussions. Future research could explore broader datasets incorporating linguistic, demographic, and cultural variables to deepen the understanding of misinformation-induced mental health distress.

Detection of Homophobia & Transphobia in Dravidian Languages: Exploring Deep Learning Methods

The increase in abusive content on online social media platforms is impacting the social life of online users. Use of offensive and hate speech has been making so-cial media toxic. Homophobia and transphobia constitute offensive comments against LGBT+ community. It becomes imperative to detect and handle these comments, to timely flag or issue a warning to users indulging in such behaviour. However, automated detection of such content is a challenging task, more so in Dravidian languages which are identified as low resource languages. Motivated by this, the paper attempts to explore applicability of different deep learning mod-els for classification of the social media comments in Malayalam and Tamil lan-guages as homophobic, transphobic and non-anti-LGBT+content. The popularly used deep learning models- Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) using GloVe embedding and transformer-based learning models (Multilingual BERT and IndicBERT) are applied to the classification problem. Results obtained show that IndicBERT outperforms the other imple-mented models, with obtained weighted average F1-score of 0.86 and 0.77 for Malayalam and Tamil, respectively. Therefore, the present work confirms higher performance of IndicBERT on the given task in selected Dravidian languages.