Causal Optimization and Reliability-Enhanced Fact-Tracking: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Approach to Misinformation Detection

The high rate of growth of misinformation on decentralized platforms causes a risk to public confidence and the integrity of decisions and requires a system of verification that is not only accurate but can be causally informed and interpreted via proxy causal metrics, reliable, and privacy-safe as well. The state-of-the-art federated learning (FL)-based fact-verification models mainly use correlation-driven patterns and do not provide ways to deal with causal reasoning, measuring formal reliability, or being resilient to Byzantine adversaries. This paper proposes a unified framework called CORE-FACT (causal optimization and reliability-enhanced fact-tracking) that can be used to conduct interpretable and robust misinformation detection in a distributed environment by combining causally informed optimization with reliability-weighted federated optimization. The proposed three-tier architecture includes: (1) a causal graph construction module, where variational attention is utilized to learn directed relationships of claims and evidence; (2) a reliability-weighted federated optimization module, where Byzantine-resilient aggregation (adaptive trust scoring) is achieved; and (3) an adaptive fact-tracking module, which is used to achieve fusion of multi-source evidence by combining hierarchical consistency verification with knowledge-graph embeddings. Empirical testing on the LIAR and FEVER datasets shows that CORE-FACT achieves 94.7% and 96.3% accuracy, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by 3.5 to 4.8 percentage points in accuracy, with 17% lower latency than GEAR and 31% lower latency than DAGNN, and 98.2% robustness against 30% Byzantine attacks. Under differential-privacy guarantees verified at ε = 10.96, δ = 10−5 (Renyi DP composition, empirical membership inference validation committed for revision), CORE-FACT achieves a 31% reduction in false positives through explicit causally informed reasoning. These findings make CORE-FACT a scalable and interpretable framework that consolidates causal optimization, trustworthiness evaluation, and secure aggregation for next-generation federated misinformation detection.