r/Fakeddit: A New Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Fake News Detection

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.