Comparative Analysis of Graph Neural Networks and Transformers for Robust Fake News Detection: A Verification and Reimplementation Study

This study compares Transformer-based models and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for fake news detection across three datasets: FakeNewsNet, ISOT, and WELFake. Transformer models (BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) demonstrated superior performance, achieving mean accuracies above 85% on FakeNewsNet and exceeding 98% on ISOT and WELFake. Specifically, RoBERTa achieved 86.16% accuracy on FakeNewsNet and 99.99% on ISOT, while GPT-2 reached 99.72% on WELFake. In contrast, GNNs (GCN, GraphSAGE, GIN, GAT) exhibited lower performance. GCN achieved 71% accuracy on FakeNewsNet but dropped to 53.30% on ISOT and 50.28% on WELFake, with F1 scores reflecting similar trends. Other GNNs, like GraphSAGE, showed even lower results, particularly on ISOT and WELFake, where performance hovered around 50%. Our findings indicate that while Transformers provide exceptional accuracy and reliability, GNNs offer potential efficiency benefits for resource-constrained scenarios despite their lower predictive performance. This study informs model selection for fake news detection tasks and encourages the exploration of hybrid approaches to balance accuracy and computational efficiency.