Graphing the Truth: Harnessing Causal Insights for Advanced Multimodal Fake News Detection

Fake news data, often sampled from the same communities, results in the veracity of news being highly correlated with certain textual and visual entities. This correlation leads fake news classification models to be prone to shortcut learning, quickly overfitting by capturing only shallow spurious correlations between labels and features. Consequently, neural networks trained on such data suffer from poor generalization and potential misclassification under distribution shifts. To address these critical challenges and enhance the robustness of fake news detection, in this paper, we propose a DIsentanglement-based Causality-awarE fake news detection method (DICE). DICE introduces a novel paradigm that moves beyond merely mitigating known correlations or relying on predefined bias categories. Specifically, DICE dynamically constructs multimodal news into a graph neural network, employing learnable node and edge mask disentanglers to effectively model and separate genuine causal relationships from spurious correlations between multimodal features and veracity labels. To reinforce this disentanglement process, we design a novel optimization framework that minimizes extrapolation risk and enforces representation orthogonality, leading to robust disentangled causal and biased representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DICE achieves superior performance on five large-scale fake news detection benchmarks. Additionally, our evaluation on a heavily biased fake news dataset demonstrates DICE’s strong generalization, suggesting its potential to inform a new paradigm in causal fake news detection.