The Tag is the Signal: URL-Agnostic Credibility Scoring for Messages on Telegram

TL;DR

This paper introduces TAG2CRED, a novel credibility scoring pipeline for short, URL-sparse messages on Telegram, leveraging tag-based classification and fine-tuned large language models to outperform traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new tag-based credibility scoring method tailored for short Telegram messages, improving accuracy and generalization over existing URL-based and lexical feature approaches.

Findings

TAG2CRED achieves ROC-AUC of 0.871, outperforming TF-IDF baseline.

Ensemble model further improves ROC-AUC to 0.901.

Model uses fewer features and generalizes better to infrequent domains.

Abstract

Telegram has become one of the leading platforms for disseminating misinformational messages. However, many existing pipelines still classify each message's credibility based on the reputation of its associated domain names or its lexical features. Such methods work well on traditional long-form news articles published by well-known sources, but high-risk posts on Telegram are short and URL-sparse, leading to failures for link-based and standard TF-IDF models. To this end, we propose the TAG2CRED pipeline, a method designed for such short, convoluted messages. Our model will directly score each post based on the tags assigned to the text. We designed a concise label system that covers the dimensions of theme, claim type, call to action, and evidence. The fine-tuned large language model (LLM) assigns tags to messages and then maps these tags to calibrated risk scores in the [0,1] interval through L2-regularized logistic regression. We evaluated 87,936 Telegram messages associated with Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), using URL masking and domain disjoint splits. The results showed that the ROC-AUC of the TAG2CRED model reached 0.871, the macro-F1 value was 0.787, and the Brier score was 0.167, outperforming the baseline TF-IDF (macro-F1 value 0.737, Brier score 0.248); at the same time, the number of features used in this model is much smaller, and the generalization ability on infrequent domains is stronger. The performance of the stacked ensemble model (TF-IDF + TAG2CRED + SBERT) was further improved over the baseline SBERT. ROC-AUC reached 0.901, and the macro-F1 value was 0.813 (Brier score 0.114). This indicates that style labels and lexical features may capture different but complementary dimensions of information risk.