# Explore the Potential of LLMs in Misinformation Detection: An Empirical Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12699 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12699/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13375/) (2023)
- [Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01967/) (2017)
- [FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01286/) (2018)
- [GPT4Graph: Can Large Language Models Understand Graph Structured Data ? An Empirical Evaluation and Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15066/) (2023)
- [Rumor Detection on Social Media with Bi-Directional Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06362/) (2020)
- [GCAN: Graph-aware Co-Attention Networks for Explainable Fake News Detection on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11648/) (2020)
- [FANG: Leveraging Social Context for Fake News Detection Using Graph Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07939/) (2020)
- [User Preference-aware Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12259/) (2021)
- [Bad Actor, Good Advisor: Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12247/) (2023)
- [Fake News in Sheep's Clothing: Robust Fake News Detection Against LLM-Empowered Style Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10830/) (2023)
- [A Bibliometric Review of Large Language Models Research from 2017 to 2023](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02020/) (2023)
- [Did You Read the Instructions? Rethinking the Effectiveness of Task Definitions in Instruction Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01150/) (2023)
- [CED: Credible Early Detection of Social Media Rumors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04175/) (2018)
- [Learning Reporting Dynamics during Breaking News for Rumour Detection in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07363/) (2016)
- [Early Detection of Fake News by Utilizing the Credibility of News, Publishers, and Users Based on Weakly Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04233/) (2020)
- [Do Sentence Interactions Matter? Leveraging Sentence Level Representations for Fake News Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12203/) (2019)
- [VarMAE: Pre-training of Variational Masked Autoencoder for Domain-adaptive Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00430/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [DELL: Generating Reactions and Explanations for LLM-Based Misinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10426/) (2024)
- [Securing Large Language Models: Threats, Vulnerabilities and Responsible Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12503/) (2024)
- [What Does the Bot Say? Opportunities and Risks of Large Language Models in Social Media Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00371/) (2024)
- [Unmasking Digital Falsehoods: A Comparative Analysis of LLM-Based Misinformation Detection Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00724/) (2025)
- [Comparing GPT-4 and Open-Source Language Models in Misinformation Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06920/) (2024)
- [Anomaly Detection and Generation with Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09368/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs be Fooled? Investigating Vulnerabilities in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20529/) (2024)
- [Are LLMs More Skeptical of Entertainment News?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01727/) (2026)
- [An Information-theoretic Propagation Denoising and Fusion Framework for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02259/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models in Misinformation Ecosystems: Misuse, Defense, and Vulnerability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10402/) (2026)
- [From Generation to Detection: Exploration of Discourse Driven Scenario based LLM Generated Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20838/) (2026)
- [SharP: Soft and Hard Prompt-Guided Augmentation with LLM for Low Resource Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13207/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their powerful ability in natural language understanding and reasoning. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study to explore the performance of LLMs on misinformation detection tasks. This study stands as the pioneering investigation into the understanding capabilities of multiple LLMs regarding both content and propagation across social media platforms. Our empirical studies on eight misinformation detection datasets show that LLM-based detectors can achieve comparable performance in text-based misinformation detection but exhibit notably constrained capabilities in comprehending propagation structure compared to existing models in propagation-based misinformation detection. Our experiments further demonstrate that LLMs exhibit great potential to enhance existing misinformation detection models. These findings highlight the potential ability of LLMs to detect misinformation.