This study evaluates the effectiveness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) in representing and utilizing multimodal content for fact-checking. To be more specific, we investigate whether incorporating multimodal content improves performance compared to text-only models and how well VLMs utilize text and image information to enhance misinformation detection. Furthermore we propose a probing classifier based solution using VLMs. Our approach extracts embeddings from the last hidden layer of selected VLMs and inputs them into a neural probing classifier for multi-class veracity classification. Through a series of experiments on two fact-checking datasets, we demonstrate that while multimodality can enhance performance, fusing separate embeddings from text and image encoders yielded superior results compared to using VLM embeddings. Furthermore, the proposed neural classifier significantly outperformed KNN and SVM baselines in leveraging extracted embeddings, highlighting its effectiveness for multimodal fact-checking.

The rapid spread of misinformation through social media platforms has raised concerns regarding its impact on public opinion. While misinformation is prevalent in other languages, the majority of research in this field has concentrated on the English language. Hence, there is a scarcity of datasets for other languages, including Turkish. To address this concern, we have introduced the FCTR dataset, consisting of 3238 real-world claims. This dataset spans multiple domains and incorporates evidence collected from three Turkish fact-checking organizations. Additionally, we aim to assess the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer learning for low-resource languages, with a particular focus on Turkish. We demonstrate in-context learning (zero-shot and few-shot) performance of large language models in this context. The experimental results indicate that the dataset has the potential to advance research in the Turkish language.