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Combination of Natural Laws (Benford’s Law and Zipf’s Law) for Fake News Detection

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Cybersecurity in Nigeria

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Cybersecurity ((BRIEFSCYBER))

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Abstract

With the increase in the number of character assassination and fake news recently happening in Nigeria, we combine Zipf’s law and Benford’s law to analyse and detect fake news. The problem of fake news has become one of the most prominent issues in Nigeria recently. In this chapter, the challenges fake news poses to Nigeria is briefly presented. Due to these challenges, we propose the combination of Benford’s law and Zipf’s law in news analysis such that the hybrid of the two laws will obey the Power law for real news and deviate for fake news. We carried out various tests on different real news sources and the result shows that real news obeys the Power law. We, therefore, propose that fake news should not obey the Power law even though we could not test on fake news sources because of the lack of verified fake news dataset.

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References

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to specially thank Mr. William Waakaa and Mr. Myom Atu for their assistance. Furthermore, the author expresses huge thanks to Prof. Anthony T. S. Ho for his support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Benue State University, Makurdi, Nigeria

    Aamo Iorliam

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  1. Aamo Iorliam
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Correspondence to Aamo Iorliam .

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Iorliam, A. (2019). Combination of Natural Laws (Benford’s Law and Zipf’s Law) for Fake News Detection. In: Cybersecurity in Nigeria. SpringerBriefs in Cybersecurity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15210-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15210-9_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15209-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15210-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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