FakeSpotter: A content and strategy agnostic Viral Misinformation Detection ToolFakeSpotter: A content and strategy agnostic Viral Misinformation Detection Tool

Computer Science > Computation and Language

[Submitted on 20 Jul 2026]

Title:FakeSpotter: A content and strategy agnostic Viral Misinformation Detection Tool

View PDFAbstract:Misinformation detection tools often rely on binary true and false classifications or models trained on historical examples, limiting their usefulness when novel misleading narratives emerge. Here, we present FakeSpotter, a content- and strategy-agnostic tool designed to estimate the viral misinformation risk of textual content by measuring structural fingerprints of misinformation rather than directly adjudicating truthfulness. FakeSpotter operationalizes a theory-driven framework across linguistic, narrative, logical, and critical-thinking dimensions, using repeated LLM assessments and domain-specific logistic regression classifiers for short and long texts. In a labelled corpus of 764 texts from social media and FakeNewsNet, FakeSpotter achieved macro F1 scores of 0.788 for short texts and 0.793 for long texts on a held-out test set. FakeSpotter's interpretive layer provides explainable outputs through feature-based scores, signal agreement, and a caution index, and can be used for social listening. These findings suggest that identifying the structural fingerprints of misinformation can support early, explainable, and human-supervised assessment of potentially viral misinformation.

Submission history

From: Federico Germani [view email][v1] Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:57:41 UTC (2,537 KB)

References & Citations

Loading...

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Recommenders and Search Tools

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.