Social media is a popular medium for the dissemination of real-time news all over the world. Easy and quick information proliferation is one of the reasons for its popularity. An extensive number of users with different age groups, gender, and societal beliefs are engaged in social media websites. Despite these favorable aspects, a significant disadvantage comes in the form of fake news, as people usually read and share information without caring about its genuineness. Therefore, it is imperative to research methods for the authentication of news. To address this issue, this article proposes a two-phase benchmark model named WELFake based on word embedding (WE) over linguistic features for fake news detection using machine learning classification. The first phase preprocesses the data set and validates the veracity of news content by using linguistic features. The second phase merges the linguistic feature sets with WE and applies voting classification. To validate its approach, this article also carefully designs a novel WELFake data set with approximately 72 000 articles, which incorporates different data sets to generate an unbiased classification output. Experimental results show that the WELFake model categorizes the news in real and fake with a 96.73% which improves the overall accuracy by 1.31% compared to bidirectional encoder representations from transformer (BERT) and 4.25% compared to convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Our frequencybased and focused analyzing writing patterns model outperforms predictive-based related works implemented using the Word2vec WE method by up to 1.73%.

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The significant evolution of smartphones has given ordinary people the power to create good-quality content which can then be spread, by the press, over multiple platforms. Citizens are almost always the first ones to arrive at a breaking news location and can provide the initial images of the scene. However, existing crowdsourced tools and platforms are predominantly centralized and are usually fed with unreliable and untrustworthy information.This work introduces a Crowd Journalism ecosystem whose core is a video marketplace web tool based on an organization-level decentralized system that can store, visualize, rate, and execute transactions of live-made videos. Smart contracts ensure that all the transactions are transparent and secure.This approach to Crowd Journalism exploits the inherent features of a blockchain such as offering trustful, anonymized, and immutable transactions, which has the potential to revolutionize the way news content is shared and commercially exploited. CCS CONCEPTS• Computer systems organization → Peer-to-peer architectures; • Information systems → Crowdsourcing.