Mining the Social Fabric: Unveiling Communities for Fake News Detection in Short Videos

Abstract: Short video platforms have become a major medium for information sharing, but their rapid content generation and algorithmic amplification also enable the widespread dissemination of fake news. Detecting misinformation in short videos is challenging due to their multi-modal nature and the limited context of individual videos. While recent methods focus on analyzing content signals-visual, textual, and audio-they often overlook implicit relationships among videos, uploaders, and events. To address this gap, we propose DugFND (Dual-community graph for fake news detection), a novel method that enhances existing video classifiers by modeling two key community patterns: (1) uploader communities, where uploaders with shared interests or similar content creation patterns group together, and (2) event-driven communities, where videos related to the same or semantically similar public events form localized clusters. We construct a heterogeneous graph connecting uploader, video, and event nodes, and design a time-aware heterogeneous graph attention network to enable effective message passing. A reconstruction-based pretraining phase further improves node representation learning. DugFND can be applied to any pre-trained classifier. Experiments on public datasets show that our method achieves significant performance gains, demonstrating the value of dual-community modeling for fake news detection in short videos.