# Proppy: A System to Unmask Propaganda in Online News

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06810 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06810/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Check-COVID: Fact-Checking COVID-19 News Claims with Scientific Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18265/) (2023)
- [Can GPT-4 Identify Propaganda? Annotation and Detection of Propaganda Spans in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17478/) (2024)
- [FakeFlow: Fake News Detection by Modeling the Flow of Affective Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09810/) (2021)
- [Interpretable Propaganda Detection in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12802/) (2021)
- [PropXplain: Can LLMs Enable Explainable Propaganda Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16550/) (2025)
- [It's All in the Embedding! Fake News Detection Using Document Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07781/) (2023)
- [Volta at SemEval-2021 Task 6: Towards Detecting Persuasive Texts and Images using Textual and Multimodal Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00240/) (2021)
- [A Second Pandemic? Analysis of Fake News About COVID-19 Vaccines in Qatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11372/) (2021)
- [Discourse Structures Guided Fine-grained Propaganda Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18544/) (2023)
- [Check News in One Click: NLP-Empowered Pro-Kremlin Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15717/) (2024)
- [IITD at the WANLP 2022 Shared Task: Multilingual Multi-Granularity Network for Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17190/) (2022)
- [Towards Detecting Persuasion on Social Media: From Model Development to Insights on Persuasion Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13844/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning for Detecting Propaganda Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19419/) (2023)
- [MemeMind at ArAIEval Shared Task: Spotting Persuasive Spans in Arabic Text with Persuasion Techniques Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04540/) (2024)
- [Can temporal article-level credibility signals improve domain-level credibility prediction?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04560/) (2026)
- [ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22388/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present proppy, the first publicly available real-world, real-time propaganda detection system for online news, which aims at raising awareness, thus potentially limiting the impact of propaganda and helping fight disinformation. The system constantly monitors a number of news sources, deduplicates and clusters the news into events, and organizes the articles about an event on the basis of the likelihood that they contain propagandistic content. The system is trained on known propaganda sources using a variety of stylistic features. The evaluation results on a standard dataset show state-of-the-art results for propaganda detection.