# A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.05638 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05638/

## Key facts

- Cited by 82 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Stance Detection for Mis- and Disinformation Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00242/) (2021)
- [Fake News in Sheep's Clothing: Robust Fake News Detection Against LLM-Empowered Style Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10830/) (2023)
- [DialFact: A Benchmark for Fact-Checking in Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08222/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Fake News Detection via CLIP-Guided Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14304/) (2022)
- [Memory-Guided Multi-View Multi-Domain Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12808/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptive Fake News Detection via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08159/) (2022)
- [Bootstrapping Multi-view Representations for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05741/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking the Generation of Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15202/) (2023)
- [Explainable Tsetlin Machine framework for fake news detection with credibility score assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09114/) (2021)
- [Cross-modal Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14057/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Active Learning based Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11206/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Misinformation Detection using Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14321/) (2024)
- [The Intended Uses of Automated Fact-Checking Artefacts: Why, How and Who](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14238/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12802/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Graph informed Fake News Classification via Heterogeneous Representation Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10457/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Veracity Classification with LLM-Predicted Credibility Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07601/) (2023)
- [PART: Pre-trained Authorship Representation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15373/) (2022)
- [A Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation Neural Network for Explainable Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14642/) (2022)
- [Dataset of Fake News Detection and Fact Verification: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03299/) (2021)
- [Exploiting User Comments for Early Detection of Fake News Prior to Users' Commenting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10429/) (2023)
- [On Unifying Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05243/) (2021)
- [EUvsDisinfo: A Dataset for Multilingual Detection of Pro-Kremlin Disinformation in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12614/) (2024)
- [Beyond the Crowd: LLM-Augmented Community Notes for Governing Health Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11423/) (2025)
- [Countering Misinformation via Emotional Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10587/) (2023)
- [Meta-Path-based Fake News Detection Leveraging Multi-level Social Context Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08022/) (2021)
- [Verifying the Robustness of Automatic Credibility Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08032/) (2023)
- [Ethio-Fake: Cutting-Edge Approaches to Combat Fake News in Under-Resourced Languages Using Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02609/) (2024)
- [Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12431/) (2025)
- [GAME-ON: Graph Attention Network based Multimodal Fusion for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12478/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper reports on a writing style analysis of hyperpartisan (i.e., extremely one-sided) news in connection to fake news. It presents a large corpus of 1,627 articles that were manually fact-checked by professional journalists from BuzzFeed. The articles originated from 9 well-known political publishers, 3 each from the mainstream, the hyperpartisan left-wing, and the hyperpartisan right-wing. In sum, the corpus contains 299 fake news, 97% of which originated from hyperpartisan publishers. We propose and demonstrate a new way of assessing style similarity between text categories via Unmasking---a meta-learning approach originally devised for authorship verification---, revealing that the style of left-wing and right-wing news have a lot more in common than any of the two have with the mainstream. Furthermore, we show that hyperpartisan news can be discriminated well by its style from the mainstream (F1=0.78), as can be satire from both (F1=0.81). Unsurprisingly, style-based fake news detection does not live up to scratch (F1=0.46). Nevertheless, the former results are important to implement pre-screening for fake news detectors.
