Fake News Classifier

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The misinformation in Fake news can be misleading, provocative, fooling the public and dangerous to society. In this era of the internet where information is flowing from every direction, at a very fast pace & the volume of data is massive, spreading of fake news can be dramatic. The most recent events of misinformation about vaccines moved me & made me realize how fake news could affect common people's lives. During this pandemic, one of the most hazardous misinformation which affected thousands of people was false information about vaccines in my country, where close to 0.5 M people lost their lives due to Covid. 

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I have witnessed many of my close ones and neighbors getting afraid of vaccines due to the various information floating around the internet about the dangers of the vaccine and having no way to find the authenticity of those prevented many from taking the vaccine in time to save them from the fatal virus. I had a lot of diversity in opinion within my own family about the vaccine and I found it very difficult to convince everyone to get vaccinated with the amount of fabricated news floating around. It was not until almost every next household was getting affected by Covid and the enormous number of people landing in hospital did people start realizing the cost they had to pay due to the wrong information which prevented them from getting vaccinated in time. Not being able to differentiate between real and fake news meant the cost of lives and continues to cost the same for many around the World. 

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Another such nasty effect of fake news witnessed by me was a riot in my city due to the false information received by the community, which was not only hard to remove from the common people's mind who had already shaped their beliefs but was very hard to contain, which forced government to put a ban on internet all-round the state for days, until the Government could control the situation caused by the emotional outburst of falsely provoked public. The event helped me understand the vulnerability of our society to fake news which then becomes extremely difficult to correct, change or remove.

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Bringing this classifier to the rescue and making it available to common people to be able to help distinguish between fake and real news can be a big help to society and I am eager to contribute to the same. With that thought my work on the current project.