Abstract:
Nowadays, social media has become the most popular way of communication
among the people. People share everything on social media, even things that they do
not know the authenticity of, or have no knowledge about. In Pakistan, typically the
people just share all sorts of news without verifying it. They don’t bother with
ensuring whether the news is true or not and just share things for the sake of gaining
likes and shares. Due to extensive use of social media, and careless sharing of news,
an important issue is fake news. Whenever a new event or new issue arises in
Pakistan, the people started posting fake news regarding that event or issue in hopes
of getting lots of likes and views. One aim of such sharing of unverified news is that
many people earn money from this as well. If we talk about politics in Pakistan, fake
news is often employed as a tool by the opposing parties to discredit each other at the
start of elections. There many examples of fake news in foreign countries and a lot of
research have been done there for the sake of identifying these fake articles. This
thesis wishes to explore the fake news characteristics due to which they got diffused
in Pakistan using social media platform “Twitter”. The study performs statistical
analysis and uses data mining techniques to find out the characteristics of fake news
or tweets and explores the relationship between different features of tweets and
presents its findings so that they can be used for the future research in Pakistan on
fake news and its implications.
