Reliable News or Propagandist News? A Neurosymbolic Model Using Genre, Topic, and Persuasion Techniques to Improve Robustness in Classification

Disinformation research has produced increasingly accurate automated fake-news detectors, but many systems remain difficult to interpret and are weakly connected to established theories of persuasion, credibility, and human judgment. In this paper, we develop a theory-informed computational framework that translates cross-disciplinary theories of fake news into measurable features for automated detection and explanation through statistical techniques and large language models. To that end, we conduct a structured cross-disciplinary review of theories from social sciences, psychology, economics, among other disciplines that reveal how fake news persuades and spreads, thereby establishing a broad theoretical foundation for computational modeling. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that theory-derived features are predictive and provide interpretable, theory-referenced diagnostic signals. Multi-feature models generally outperform individual features, although gains among the strongest small feature combinations are modest. Our work highlights the value of interdisciplinary perspectives in building robust and interpretable fake news detection systems, advancing the foundation for human-centered approaches in combating disinformation.

Fake news generally refers to false information that is spread deliberately to deceive people, which has detrimental social effects. Existing fake news detection methods primarily learn the semantic features from news content or integrate structural features from propagation. However, in practical scenarios, due to the semantic ambiguity of informal language and unreliable user interactive behaviors on social media, there are inherent semantic and structural noises in news content and propagation. Although some recent works consider the effect of irrelevant user interactions in a hybrid-modeling way, they still suffer from the mutual interference between structural noise and semantic noise, leading to limited performance for robust detection. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a novel Propagation Structure-Semantic Transfer Learning framework (PSS-TL) for robust fake news detection under a teacher-student architecture. Specifically, we design dual teacher models to learn semantics knowledge and structure knowledge from noisy news content and propagation structure independently. Besides, we design a Multi-channel Knowledge Distillation (MKD) loss to enable the student model to acquire specialized knowledge from the teacher models, thereby avoiding mutual interference. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of our method.

Propaganda detection in social media is challenging due to noisy, short texts and low annotation agreements. We introduce a new intent-focused taxonomy of propaganda techniques and compare it against an established, higher-agreement schema. Along three dimensions (model portfolio, schema effects, and prompting strategy) we evaluate the taxonomies as a classification task with the help of four language models (GPT-4.1-nano, Phi-4 14B, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen3-14B). Our results show that fine-tuning is essential, since it transforms weak zero-shot baselines into competitive systems and reveals methodological differences that are hidden using base models. Across schemas, the Qwen models achieve the strongest overall performance, and Phi-4 14B consistently outperforms GPT-4.1-nano. Our hierarchical prompting method (HiPP), which predicts fine-grained techniques before aggregating them, is especially beneficial after fine-tuning and on the more ambiguous, low-agreement taxonomy, while remaining competitive on the simpler schema. The HQP dataset, annotated with the new intent-based labels, provides a richer lens on propaganda's strategic goals and a challenging benchmark for future work on robust, real-world detection.