MEFaND: A Multimodel Framework for Early Fake News Detection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alongside social media platforms’ rise in popularity, fake news circulation has increased, highlighting the need for more practical methods to detect this phenomenon. The constantly evolving format of fake news makes it difficult for approaches that rely on a single modality of news to generalize the different types of false news. Furthermore, earlier approaches require extensive propagation data to determine the veracity of news, which can be challenging to collect in the early stages of news dissemination. Thus, we propose a multimodal early fake news detection approach that leverages latent insights into both news content and propagation knowledge. We design a multimodule architecture using graph neural networks (GNNs) to represent edge-enhanced and node-enhanced propagation graphs and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERTs) to generate contextualized representations of news content. Our approach tackles the challenge of early detection in a more realistic scenario, accessing early propagation data in a single social media post and short-length news content. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive studies on user characteristics using statistical techniques to identify attributes with strong discriminative capability for identifying false news. We also analyse temporal and structural properties of fake news propagation graphs to demonstrate distinguishable patterns of false and real news behavior. Our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, achieving an impressive F1-score of 99% and 96% on two public datasets. The individual contribution of various components in our model to the final performance is also measured, which can be insightful for future research on multimodal false news detection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".