The Stepwise Deception: Simulating the Evolution from True News to Fake News with LLM Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces FUSE, a simulation framework using LLM agents to model and analyze the gradual evolution of true news into fake news within social networks, aiding early detection and understanding.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel LLM-based simulation framework, FUSE, that models fake news evolution from real news and introduces FUSE-EVAL for measuring truth deviation.

Findings

FUSE effectively captures fake news evolution patterns.

FUSE aligns closely with human judgments.

Early intervention is crucial in fake news mitigation.

Abstract

With the growing spread of misinformation online, understanding how true news evolves into fake news has become crucial for early detection and prevention. However, previous research has often assumed fake news inherently exists rather than exploring its gradual formation. To address this gap, we propose FUSE (Fake news evolUtion Simulation framEwork), a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based simulation approach explicitly focusing on fake news evolution from real news. Our framework model a social network with four distinct types of LLM agents commonly observed in daily interactions: spreaders who propagate information, commentators who provide interpretations, verifiers who fact-check, and bystanders who observe passively to simulate realistic daily interactions that progressively distort true news. To quantify these gradual distortions, we develop FUSE-EVAL, a comprehensive evaluation framework measuring truth deviation along multiple linguistic and semantic dimensions. Results show that FUSE effectively captures fake news evolution patterns and accurately reproduces known fake news, aligning closely with human evaluations. Experiments demonstrate that FUSE accurately reproduces known fake news evolution scenarios, aligns closely with human judgment, and highlights the importance of timely intervention at early stages. Our framework is extensible, enabling future research on broader scenarios of fake news.