Dual stream graph augmented transformer model integrating BERT and GNNs for context aware fake news detection

The rapid proliferation of misinformation across digital platforms has highlighted the critical need for advanced fake news detection mechanisms. Traditional methods primarily rely on textual analysis, often neglecting the structural patterns of news dissemination, which play a crucial role in determining credibility. To address this limitation, this study proposes a Dual-Stream Graph-Augmented Transformer Model, integrating BERT for deep textual representation and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model the propagation structure of misinformation. The objective is to enhance fake news detection by leveraging both linguistic and network-based features. The proposed method employs Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Graph Transformers to extract contextual relationships, while an attention-based fusion mechanism effectively integrates textual and graph embeddings for classification. The model is implemented using PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers, with experiments conducted on the FakeNewsNet dataset, which includes news articles, user interactions, and source metadata. Evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and AUC-ROC indicate superior performance, with an accuracy of 99%, outperforming baseline models such as Bi-LSTM and RoBERTa-GCN. The study concludes that incorporating graph-based propagation features significantly improves fake news detection, providing a robust, scalable, and context-aware solution. Future enhancements will focus on refining credibility assessment mechanisms and extending the model to support multilingual and multimodal misinformation detection across diverse digital platforms.