Papers › SoK: Machine Learning for Misinformation Detection
SoK: Machine Learning for Misinformation Detection
Madelyne Xiao, Jonathan Mayer
We examine the disconnect between scholarship and practice in applying machine learning to trust and safety problems, using misinformation detection as a case study. We survey literature on automated detection of misinformation across a corpus of 248 well-cited papers in the field. We then examine subsets of papers for data and code availability, design missteps, reproducibility, and generalizability. Our paper corpus includes published work in security, natural language processing, and computational social science. Across these disparate disciplines, we identify common errors in dataset and method design. In general, detection tasks are often meaningfully distinct from the challenges that online services actually face. Datasets and model evaluation are often non-representative of real-world contexts, and evaluation frequently is not independent of model training. We demonstrate the limitations of current detection methods in a series of three representative replication studies. Based on the results of these analyses and our literature survey, we conclude that the current state-of-the-art in fully-automated misinformation detection has limited efficacy in detecting human-generated misinformation. We offer recommendations for evaluating applications of machine learning to trust and safety problems and recommend future directions for research.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections