CrediRAG: Network-Augmented Credibility-Based Retrieval for Misinformation Detection in Reddit

Fake news threatens democracy and exacerbates the polarization and divisions in society; therefore, accurately detecting online misinformation is the foundation of addressing this issue. We present CrediRAG, the first fake news detection model that combines language models with access to a rich external political knowledge base with a dense social network to detect fake news across social media at scale. CrediRAG uses a news retriever to initially assign a misinformation score to each post based on the source credibility of similar news articles to the post title content. CrediRAG then improves the initial retrieval estimations through a novel weighted post-to-post network connected based on shared commenters and weighted by the average stance of all shared commenters across every pair of posts. We achieve 11 in detecting misinformative posts over state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments conducted on curated real-world Reddit data of over 200,000 posts demonstrate the superior performance of CrediRAG on existing baselines. Thus, our approach offers a more accurate and scalable solution to combat the spread of fake news across social media platforms.