Equal Truth: Rumor Detection with Invariant Group Fairness

Junyi Chen, Mengjia Wu, Qian Liu, Jing Sun, Ying Ding, Yi Zhang


Abstract
Due to the widespread dissemination of rumors on social media platforms, detecting rumors has been a long-standing concern for various communities. However, existing rumor detection methods rarely consider the fairness issues inherent in the model, which can lead to biased predictions across different stakeholder groups (e.g., domains and originating platforms of the detected content), also undermining their detection effectiveness. In this work, we propose a two-step framework to address this issue. First, we perform unsupervised partitioning to dynamically identify potential unfair data patterns without requiring sensitive attribute annotations. Then, we apply invariant learning to these partitions to extract fair and informative feature representations that enhance rumor detection. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms strong baselines regarding detection and fairness performance, and also demonstrate robust performance on out-of-distribution samples. Further empirical results indicate that our learned features remain informative and fair across stakeholder groups and can correct errors when applied to existing baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.584
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10994–11007
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.584/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junyi Chen, Mengjia Wu, Qian Liu, Jing Sun, Ying Ding, and Yi Zhang. 2025. Equal Truth: Rumor Detection with Invariant Group Fairness. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 10994–11007, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Equal Truth: Rumor Detection with Invariant Group Fairness (Chen et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.584.pdf
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