English

From Manipulation to Mistrust: Explaining Diverse Micro-Video Misinformation for Robust Debunking in the Wild

Social and Information Networks 2026-03-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The rise of micro-videos has reshaped how misinformation spreads, amplifying its speed, reach, and impact on public trust. Existing benchmarks typically focus on a single deception type, overlooking the diversity of real-world cases that involve multimodal manipulation, AI-generated content, cognitive bias, and out-of-context reuse. Meanwhile, most detection models lack fine-grained attribution, limiting interpretability and practical utility. To address these gaps, we introduce WildFakeBench, a large-scale benchmark of over 10,000 real-world micro-videos covering diverse misinformation types and sources, each annotated with expert-defined attribution labels. Building on this foundation, we develop FakeAgent, a Delphi-inspired multi-agent reasoning framework that integrates multimodal understanding with external evidence for attribution-grounded analysis. FakeAgent jointly analyzes content and retrieved evidence to identify manipulation, recognize cognitive and AI-generated patterns, and detect out-of-context misinformation. Extensive experiments show that FakeAgent consistently outperforms existing MLLMs across all misinformation types, while WildFakeBench provides a realistic and challenging testbed for advancing explainable micro-video misinformation detection. Data and code are available at: https://github.com/Aiyistan/FakeAgent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.25423,
  title  = {From Manipulation to Mistrust: Explaining Diverse Micro-Video Misinformation for Robust Debunking in the Wild},
  author = {Zhi Zeng and Yifei Yang and Jiaying Wu and Xulang Zhang and Xiangzheng Kong and Herun Wan and Zihan Ma and Minnan Luo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.25423},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted at WWW 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:39:13.883Z