Exploring Content and Social Connections of Fake News with Explainable Text and Graph Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Lourenço, Vítor N., Paes, Aline, Weyde, Tillman
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Lourenço, Vítor N.
Paes, Aline
Weyde, Tillman
author_facet Lourenço, Vítor N.
Paes, Aline
Weyde, Tillman
contents The global spread of misinformation and concerns about content trustworthiness have driven the development of automated fact-checking systems. Since false information often exploits social media dynamics such as "likes" and user networks to amplify its reach, effective solutions must go beyond content analysis to incorporate these factors. Moreover, simply labelling content as false can be ineffective or even reinforce biases such as automation and confirmation bias. This paper proposes an explainable framework that combines content, social media, and graph-based features to enhance fact-checking. It integrates a misinformation classifier with explainability techniques to deliver complete and interpretable insights supporting classification decisions. Experiments demonstrate that multimodal information improves performance over single modalities, with evaluations conducted on datasets in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Additionally, the framework's explanations were assessed for interpretability, trustworthiness, and robustness with a novel protocol, showing that it effectively generates human-understandable justifications for its predictions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10040
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Content and Social Connections of Fake News with Explainable Text and Graph Learning
Lourenço, Vítor N.
Paes, Aline
Weyde, Tillman
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
The global spread of misinformation and concerns about content trustworthiness have driven the development of automated fact-checking systems. Since false information often exploits social media dynamics such as "likes" and user networks to amplify its reach, effective solutions must go beyond content analysis to incorporate these factors. Moreover, simply labelling content as false can be ineffective or even reinforce biases such as automation and confirmation bias. This paper proposes an explainable framework that combines content, social media, and graph-based features to enhance fact-checking. It integrates a misinformation classifier with explainability techniques to deliver complete and interpretable insights supporting classification decisions. Experiments demonstrate that multimodal information improves performance over single modalities, with evaluations conducted on datasets in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Additionally, the framework's explanations were assessed for interpretability, trustworthiness, and robustness with a novel protocol, showing that it effectively generates human-understandable justifications for its predictions.
title Exploring Content and Social Connections of Fake News with Explainable Text and Graph Learning
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10040