Automated fact-checking (AFC) systems are susceptible to adversarial attacks, enabling false claims to evade detection. Existing adversarial frameworks typically rely on injecting noise or altering semantics, yet no existing framework exploits the adversarial potential of persuasion techniques against AFC systems, which are widely used in disinformation campaigns to manipulate audiences. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of persuasive adversarial attacks on AFCs by employing an LLM to rephrase claims using persuasion techniques. Considering 15 techniques grouped into 5 categories, we study the effects of persuasion on both claim verification and evidence retrieval using a decoupled evaluation strategy. Experiments on the FEVER and FEVEROUS benchmarks show that persuasion attacks can substantially degrade both verification performance and evidence retrieval. Our analysis identifies persuasion techniques as a potent class of adversarial attacks, highlighting the need for more robust AFC systems.

Disinformation and advanced generative AI content pose a significant challenge for journalists and fact-checkers who must rapidly verify digital media. While many NLP models exist for detecting signals like persuasion techniques, subjectivity, and AI-generated text, they often remain inaccessible to non-expert users and are not integrated into their daily workflows as a unified framework. This paper demonstrates the Verification Assistant, a browser-based tool designed to bridge this gap. The Verification Assistant, a core component of the widely adopted Verification Plugin (140,000+ users), allows users to submit URLs or media files to a unified interface. It automatically extracts content and routes it to a suite of backend NLP classifiers, presenting actionable credibility signals, AI-generation likelihood, and other verification advice in an easy-to-digest format. This paper will showcase the tool’s architecture, its integration of multiple NLP services, and its real-world application for detecting disinformation.

This paper describes our approach for SemEval- 2023 Task 3: Detecting the category, the fram- ing, and the persuasion techniques in online news in a multilingual setup. For Subtask 1 (News Genre), we propose an ensemble of fully trained and adapter mBERT models which was ranked joint-first for German, and had the high- est mean rank of multi-language teams. For Subtask 2 (Framing), we achieved first place in 3 languages, and the best average rank across all the languages, by using two separate ensem- bles: a monolingual RoBERTa-MUPPETLARGE and an ensemble of XLM-RoBERTaLARGE with adapters and task adaptive pretraining. For Sub- task 3 (Persuasion Techniques), we trained a monolingual RoBERTa-Base model for English and a multilingual mBERT model for the re- maining languages, which achieved top 10 for all languages, including 2nd for English. For each subtask, we compared monolingual and multilingual approaches, and considered class imbalance techniques.