Long Live Fine-Tuning: Task-Specific Transformers Outperform Zero-Shot LLMs for Misinformation Response Classification on Reddit
As large language models (LLMs) become default tools for online information verification, an implicit assumption follows them: that scale and general capability are sufficient for nuanced classification of misinformation discourse. We test this assumption directly on 900 Reddit comments spanning three PolitiFact-verified misinformation claims (environment, health, immigration), labelled as belief (propagates the claim), fact-check (corrects it), or other. We compare nine models across three paradigms -- BART-MNLI, three Llama variants, three commercial frontier LLMs (Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini Flash Lite 2.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6), and fine-tuned DistilBERT and RoBERTa -- under universal and t...
| Authors | JooYoung Lee, Lin Tian, Angela Brillantes et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
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