BEYOND ALGORITHMS: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO FAKE NEWS DETECTION USING MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES

The internet has become a major source of information, but it also facilitates the rapid spread of fake news, which can significantly influence public opinion and social decisions. While various techniques have been developed for detecting fake news, many studies focus on individual algorithms, which often result in suboptimal performance. This study addresses this gap by comparing machine learning models, including Support Vector Classification (SVC), XGBoost, and a Stacking Ensemble that combines both SVC and XGBoost, to determine the most effective approach for fake news detection. Text preprocessing was performed using IndoBERT, which provides context-aware and semantically rich text representations specifically for the Indonesian language. The evaluation results demonstrate that the Stacking Ensemble outperforms the individual models, achieving an accuracy of 82%, compared to 79% for XGBoost and 78% for SVC. This superior performance is attributed to the complementary strengths of the base models: SVC excels in handling high-dimensional data, while XGBoost effectively manages imbalanced datasets and captures complex feature interactions. The use of IndoBERT further enhances model performance by improving text representation through contextual embeddings. These findings highlight the effectiveness of ensemble learning in enhancing predictive performance and robustness for fake news detection, demonstrating the potential of combining different machine learning techniques with advanced preprocessing methods to achieve more reliable results.