PolyTruth: Multilingual Disinformation Detection using Transformer-Based Language Models

Abstract

Disinformation spreads rapidly across linguistic boundaries, yet most AI models are still benchmarked only on English. We address this gap with a systematic comparison of five multilingual transformer models: mBERT, XLM, XLM-RoBERTa, RemBERT, and mT5 on a common fake-vs-true machine learning classification task. While transformer-based language models have demonstrated notable success in detecting disinformation in English, their effectiveness in multilingual contexts still remains up for debate. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce PolyTruth Disinfo Corpus, a novel corpus of 60,486 statement pairs (false claim vs. factual correction) spanning over twenty five languages that collectively cover five language families and a broad topical range from politics, health, climate, finance, and conspiracy, half of which are fact-checked disinformation claims verified by an augmented MindBugs Discovery dataset. Our experiments revealed performance variations. Models such as RemBERT achieved better overall accuracy, particularly excelling in low-resource languages, whereas models like mBERT and XLM exhibit considerable limitations when training data is scarce. We provide a discussion of these performance patterns and implications for real-world deployment. The dataset is publicly available on our GitHub repository to encourage further experimentation and advancement. Our findings illuminate both the potential and the current limitations of AI systems for multilingual disinformation detection.