  The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by
disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very
foundations of democracy. The recent advance of generative artificial
intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine
news from fabricated stories. In response to this challenge, we introduce
VeraCT Scan, a novel retrieval-augmented system for fake news detection. This
system operates by extracting the core facts from a given piece of news and
subsequently conducting an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or
conflicting reports. Then sources' credibility is leveraged for information
verification. Besides determining the veracity of news, we also provide
transparent evidence and reasoning to support its conclusions, resulting in the
interpretability and trust in the results. In addition to GPT-4 Turbo, Llama-2
13B is also fine-tuned for news content understanding, information
verification, and reasoning. Both implementations have demonstrated
state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection.
