# RCMN: Understanding Misleadingness in Influential Public Discourse

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27358/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [FEVER: a large-scale dataset for Fact Extraction and VERification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05355/) (2018)
- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- ["Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00648/) (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)
- [MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03242/) (2019)
- [Generating Fact Checking Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05773/) (2020)
- [NewsCLIPpings: Automatic Generation of Out-of-Context Multimodal Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05893/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Multimodal Fact-Checking and Explanation Generation: A Challenging Dataset and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12487/) (2022)
- [The science of fake news](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07903/) (2023)
- [MuMiN: A Large-Scale Multilingual Multimodal Fact-Checked Misinformation Social Network Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11684/) (2022)
- [FIRE: Fact-checking with Iterative Retrieval and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00784/) (2024)
- [GoodNewsEveryone: A Corpus of News Headlines Annotated with Emotions, Semantic Roles, and Reader Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03184/) (2019)
- [Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers' Reactions to News Headlines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08790/) (2021)
- [AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11073/) (2024)
- [FACTIFY3M: A Benchmark for Multimodal Fact Verification with Explainability through 5W Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05523/) (2023)
- [Edited Media Understanding Frames: Reasoning About the Intent and Implications of Visual Misinformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04726/) (2020)
- [COVE: COntext and VEracity prediction for out-of-context images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01194/) (2025)
- [M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23508/) (2025)
- [VeriTaS: The First Dynamic Benchmark for Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08611/) (2026)
- [What's Left Unsaid? Detecting and Correcting Misleading Omissions in Multimodal News Previews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05563/) (2026)
- [MALicious INTent Dataset and Inoculating LLMs for Enhanced Disinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14525/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Influential public discourse shapes public beliefs and can also mislead, not only through what is stated, but also through how information is framed, omitted, contextualised, and communicated. Yet less research has focused on how such misleadingness arises and shapes the interpretations formed by readers. To address this gap, we introduce Reader-Centric Misleadingness Understanding (RCMN), a framework that operationalises misleadingness through five dimensions: misleading mechanism, likely reader interpretation, evidence-warranted interpretation, emotional arousal, and communicative intent. Based on this framework, we construct an evidence-grounded dataset of influential public discourse. Empirical findings show that misleadingness is diverse and extends well beyond fabrication, with unsupported inference, exaggeration, and omission among the prevalent mechanisms, and is frequently associated with heightened emotional arousal and distortive communicative intent. Moreover, we investigate whether lightweight claim-and-context representations retain sufficient cues for understanding reader-centric misleadingness without access to richer contextual, evidential, and multimodal information. Evaluation across five recent generative foundation models shows that reader-level interpretations can often be recovered from such limited representations, whereas identifying how misleadingness is produced remains considerably more challenging. These findings highlight the potential of lightweight representations for scalable misleadingness analysis, while reliable understanding of misleading mechanisms continues to require richer contextual and evidential grounding.