# Fake or Real? A Study of Arabic Satirical Fake News

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00452/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SaRoCo: Detecting Satire in a Novel Romanian Corpus of News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06456/) (2021)
- [FreSaDa: A French Satire Data Set for Cross-Domain Satire Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04828/) (2021)
- [Ta'keed: The First Generative Fact-Checking System for Arabic Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14067/) (2024)
- [Arabic Fake News Detection Based on Deep Contextualized Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03114/) (2022)
- [Comparison of Multilingual and Bilingual Models for Satirical News Detection of Arabic and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10730/) (2024)
- [MuSaRoNews: A Multidomain, Multimodal Satire Dataset from Romanian News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07826/) (2025)
- [BOUTEF: A Multilingual Corpus for FakeNews in North Africa -- Language as a Weapon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00193/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One very common type of fake news is satire which comes in a form of a news website or an online platform that parodies reputable real news agencies to create a sarcastic version of reality. This type of fake news is often disseminated by individuals on their online platforms as it has a much stronger effect in delivering criticism than through a straightforward message. However, when the satirical text is disseminated via social media without mention of its source, it can be mistaken for real news. This study conducts several exploratory analyses to identify the linguistic properties of Arabic fake news with satirical content. We exploit these features to build a number of machine learning models capable of identifying satirical fake news with an accuracy of up to 98.6%.