The role of AI in combating misinformation: leveraging text mining and social networking analysis

Abstract

Misinformation on social media can be a severe threat to social trust, safety, and health of the population, especially in times of an epidemic like the Monkeypox outbreak. This study specifically focuses on a hybrid RoBERTa–GRU architecture designed to capture both contextual semantics and temporal dependencies in social media discourse. This research presents how the combination of text mining and social network analysis enables Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support misinformation detection. The proposal of a hybrid architecture that integrates RoBERTa and GRU-based embeddings in a contextual fashion and GRU-based modelling of sequential patterns helps identify and substantiate misinformation in social media posts. Based on a curated X (formerly Twitter) dataset consisting of Monkeypox posts (5787 posts), the model provided state-of-the-art results, with ROC-AUC 0.9979 and Cohen’s kappa 0.9887; standalone baselines were also surpassed. Results reveal that the proposed transformer–RNN hybrid effectively captures both semantic depth and temporal relationships in misinformation detection tasks. In addition to performance, the paper addresses the limitations of dataset bias, multilingual constraint issues, and scalability as related to cross-linguistic applicability, multimodal study, and performance in real-time and resource-limited systems. The study adds value in this emerging body of knowledge on AI-driven social media analytics by offering practical guidance for mitigating health-related misinformation online.