Uchendu Uchendu


2026

Harmful content detectors—particularly disinformation classifiers—are predominantly developed and evaluated on Standard American English (), leaving their robustness to dialectal variation unexplored. We present , the first benchmark for evaluating disinformation detection robustness across 50 English dialects spanning U.S., British, African, Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific varieties. Using Multi-VALUE’s linguistically-grounded transformations, we introduce D-CUBE (Dialectal Disinformation Detection Corpus), a core corpus component of comprising 195K samples derived from established disinformation benchmarks. Our evaluation of 16 detection models reveals systematic vulnerabilities: human-written dialectal content degrades detection by 1.4–3.6% F1, while AI-generated content remains stable. Fine-tuned transformers substantially outperform zero-shot LLMs (96.6% vs. 78.3% best-case F1), with some models exhibiting catastrophic failures exceeding 33% degradation on mixed content. Cross-dialectal transfer analysis across 2,450 dialect pairs shows that multilingual models (mDeBERTa: 97.2% average F1) generalize effectively, while monolingual models like RoBERTa and XLM-RoBERTa fail on dialectal inputs. These findings demonstrate that current disinformation detectors may systematically disadvantage hundreds of millions of non- speakers worldwide. We release the benchmark, including the , and evaluation tools.