At present, a large number of rumors are mixed in with various kinds of news, such as current affairs, politics, social economy, and military activities, which seriously reduces the credibility of Internet information and hinders the positive development of various fields. In previous research on rumors, most scholars have focused their attention on the textual features, contextual semantic features, or single-emotion features of rumors but have not paid attention to the chain reaction caused by the hidden emotions in comments in social groups. Therefore, this paper comprehensively uses the emotional signals in rumor texts and comments to extract emotional features and determines the relationship between them to establish dual-emotion features. The main research achievements include the following aspects: (1) this study verifies that, in the field of affective characteristics, the combination of rumor-text emotion and comment emotion is superior to other baseline affective characteristics, and the detection performance of each component is outstanding; (2) the results prove that the combination of dual-emotion features and a semantic-feature-based detector (BiGRU and CNN) can improve the effectiveness of the detector; (3) this paper proposes reconstructing the dataset according to time series to verify the generalization ability of dual affective features; (4) the attention mechanism is used to combine domain features and semantic features to extract more fine-grained features. A large number of data experiments show that the dual-emotion features can be effectively compatible with an existing rumor detector, enhance the detector’s performance, and improve the detection accuracy.

With the widespread adoption of social media, the rapid dissemination of rumors poses a severe threat to public perception and social stability, emerging as a major challenge confronting society. Hence, the development of efficient and accurate rumor detection models has become an urgent need. Given the challenges of rumor detection tasks, including data scarcity, feature complexity, and difficulties in cross-task knowledge transfer, this paper proposes a BERT–GCN–Transfer Learning model, an integrated rumor detection model that combines BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), and transfer learning techniques. By harnessing BERT’s robust text representation capabilities, the GCN’s feature extraction prowess on graph-structured data, and the advantage of transfer learning in cross-task knowledge sharing, the model achieves effective rumor detection on social media platforms. Experimental results indicate that this model achieves accuracies of 0.878 and 0.892 on the Twitter15 and Twitter16 datasets, respectively, significantly enhancing the accuracy of rumor detection compared to baseline models. Moreover, it greatly improves the efficiency of model training.