ManiTweet: A New Benchmark for Identifying Manipulation of News on Social Media

Kung-Hsiang Huang, Hou Pong Chan, Kathleen McKeown, Heng Ji


Abstract
Considerable advancements have been made to tackle the misrepresentation of information derived from reference articles in the domains of fact-checking and faithful summarization. However, an unaddressed aspect remains - the identification of social media posts that manipulate information within associated news articles. This task presents a significant challenge, primarily due to the prevalence of personal opinions in such posts. We present a novel task, identifying manipulation of news on social media, which aims to detect manipulation in social media posts and identify manipulated or inserted information. To study this task, we have proposed a data collection schema and curated a dataset called ManiTweet, consisting of 3.6K pairs of tweets and corresponding articles. Our analysis demonstrates that this task is highly challenging, with large language models (LLMs) yielding unsatisfactory performance. Additionally, we have developed a simple yet effective basic model that outperforms LLMs significantly on the ManiTweet dataset. Finally, we have conducted an exploratory analysis of human-written tweets, unveiling intriguing connections between manipulation and the domain and factuality of news articles, as well as revealing that manipulated sentences are more likely to encapsulate the main story or consequences of a news outlet.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.739
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11161–11180
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.739/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Hou Pong Chan, Kathleen McKeown, and Heng Ji. 2025. ManiTweet: A New Benchmark for Identifying Manipulation of News on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 11161–11180, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ManiTweet: A New Benchmark for Identifying Manipulation of News on Social Media (Huang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.739.pdf