Contradicted in Reliable, Replicated in Unreliable: Dual-Source Reference for Fake News Early Detection

Abstract Early detection of fake news is crucial to mitigate its negative impact. Current research in fake news detection often utilizes the difference between real and fake news regarding the support degree from reliable sources. However, it has overlooked their different semantic outlier degrees among unreliable source information during the same period. Since fake news often serves idea propaganda, unreliable sources usually publish a lot of information with the same propaganda idea during the same period, making it less likely to be a semantic outlier. To leverage this difference, we propose the Reliable-Unreliable Source Reference (RUSR) Fake News Early Detection Method. RUSR introduces the publication background for detected news, which consists of related news with common main objects of description and slightly earlier publication from both reliable and unreliable sources. Furthermore, we develop a strongly preference-driven support degree evaluation model and a two-hop semantic outlier degree evaluation model, which respectively mitigate the interference of news with weak validation effectiveness and the tightness degree of semantic cluster. The designed redistribution module and expanding range relative time encoding are adopted by both models, respectively optimizing early checkpoint of training and expressing the relevance of news implied by their release time gap. Finally, we present a multi-model mutual benefit and collaboration framework that enables the multi-model mutual benefit of generalization in training and multi-perspective prediction of news authenticity in inference. Experiments on our newly constructed dataset demonstrate the superiority of RUSR.