PCoT: Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought for Detecting Fake News and Social Media Disinformation

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Hauptverfasser: Modzelewski, Arkadiusz, Sosnowski, Witold, Labruna, Tiziano, Wierzbicki, Adam, Martino, Giovanni Da San
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Modzelewski, Arkadiusz
Sosnowski, Witold
Labruna, Tiziano
Wierzbicki, Adam
Martino, Giovanni Da San
author_facet Modzelewski, Arkadiusz
Sosnowski, Witold
Labruna, Tiziano
Wierzbicki, Adam
Martino, Giovanni Da San
contents Disinformation detection is a key aspect of media literacy. Psychological studies have shown that knowledge of persuasive fallacies helps individuals detect disinformation. Inspired by these findings, we experimented with large language models (LLMs) to test whether infusing persuasion knowledge enhances disinformation detection. As a result, we introduce the Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought (PCoT), a novel approach that leverages persuasion to improve disinformation detection in zero-shot classification. We extensively evaluate PCoT on online news and social media posts. Moreover, we publish two novel, up-to-date disinformation datasets: EUDisinfo and MultiDis. These datasets enable the evaluation of PCoT on content entirely unseen by the LLMs used in our experiments, as the content was published after the models' knowledge cutoffs. We show that, on average, PCoT outperforms competitive methods by 15% across five LLMs and five datasets. These findings highlight the value of persuasion in strengthening zero-shot disinformation detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PCoT: Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought for Detecting Fake News and Social Media Disinformation
Modzelewski, Arkadiusz
Sosnowski, Witold
Labruna, Tiziano
Wierzbicki, Adam
Martino, Giovanni Da San
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Disinformation detection is a key aspect of media literacy. Psychological studies have shown that knowledge of persuasive fallacies helps individuals detect disinformation. Inspired by these findings, we experimented with large language models (LLMs) to test whether infusing persuasion knowledge enhances disinformation detection. As a result, we introduce the Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought (PCoT), a novel approach that leverages persuasion to improve disinformation detection in zero-shot classification. We extensively evaluate PCoT on online news and social media posts. Moreover, we publish two novel, up-to-date disinformation datasets: EUDisinfo and MultiDis. These datasets enable the evaluation of PCoT on content entirely unseen by the LLMs used in our experiments, as the content was published after the models' knowledge cutoffs. We show that, on average, PCoT outperforms competitive methods by 15% across five LLMs and five datasets. These findings highlight the value of persuasion in strengthening zero-shot disinformation detection.
title PCoT: Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought for Detecting Fake News and Social Media Disinformation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06842