MHDF: Multi-source Heterogeneous Data Progressive Fusion for Fake News Detection

Social media platforms are inundated with an extensive volume of unverified information, most of which originates from heterogeneous data from a variety of diverse sources, spreading rapidly and widely, thereby posing a significant threat to both individuals and society. An existing challenge in multimodal fake news detection is its limitation to acquiring textual and visual data exclusively from a single source, which leads to a high level of subjectivity in news reporting, incomplete data coverage, and difficulties in adapting to the various forms and sources of fake news. In this paper, we propose a fake news detection model (MHDF) for multi-source heterogeneous data progressive fusion. Our approach begins with gathering, filtering, and cleaning data from multiple sources to create a reliable multi-source multimodal dataset, which involved obtaining reports from diverse perspectives on each event. Subsequently, progressive fusion is achieved by combining features from diverse sources. This is achieved by inputting the features obtained from the textual feature extractor and visual feature extractor into the news textual and visual feature fusion module. We also integrated sentiment features from the text into the model, allowing for multi-level feature extraction. Experimental results and analysis indicate that our approach outperforms other methods.