Abstract
There has been a tremendous increase in the popularity of social media such as blogs, Instagram, twitter, online websites etc. The increasing utilization of these platforms have enabled the users to share information on a regular basis and also publicize social events. Nevertheless, most of the multimedia events are filled with social bots which raise concerns on the authenticity of the information shared in these events. With the increasing advancements of social bots, the complexity of detecting and fact-checking is also increasing. This is mainly due to the similarity between authorized users and social bots. Several researchers have introduced different models for detecting social bots and fact checking. However, these models suffer from various challenges. In most of the cases, these bots become indistinguishable from existing users and it is challenging to extract relevant attributes of the bots. In addition, it is also challenging to collect large scale data and label them for training the bot detection models. The performance of existing traditional classifiers used for bot detection processes is not satisfactory. This paper presents:•A machine learning based adaptive fuzzy neuro model integrated with a hist gradient boosting (HGB) classifier for identifying the persisting pattern of social bots for fake news detection.•And Harris Hawk optimization with Bi-LSTM for social bot prediction.•Results validate the efficacy of the HGB classifier which achieves a phenomenal accuracy of 95.64 % for twitter bot and 98.98 % for twitch bot dataset.