Multi-modal Graph Neural Networks with Post-Hoc Community Analysis for Robust Fake News Detection
摘要
The misinformation that is spreading in digital media demands the development of robust automated detection systems that can understand semantic content and contextual metadata. This paper introduces a novel multi-modal graph neural network framework combining BERT-based semantic embeddings with metadata-driven graph construction for improved fake news detection. Our approach builds a heterogeneous graph that incorporates features such as speaker credibility, political affiliation, and topical similarity, besides adopting community detection as a post-hoc analysis technique for exploring misinformation clusters. The proposed method achieves accuracy of 76.9%, F1-score that is 0.744, and recall-0.778 on the PolitiFact dataset, outperforming strong baseline models such as BERT+Linear and TF-IDF+SVM. We adopt a GraphSAGE-based relational multi-modal approach, fusing BERT embeddings with metadata-derived representations. Interpretability is established through community detection and ablation studies that highlight feature contributions. Overall, the proposed framework offers a well-balanced trade-off between performance and transparency, contributing to more reliable mis-information detection.