The study introduces a unified method for measuring rhetorical distortion across six social media platforms and two languages, distinguishing between creator posts and their replies. It identifies five distortion dimensions—Significance Inflation, Anxiety Manufacturing, Novelty Claims, Loaded Language, and Temporal Distortion—using a three‑tier pipeline that combines lexical rules, negative filters, and LLM verification. Results show that distortion is far more strongly linked to the platform than content type, with X/Twitter exhibiting the highest distortion scores, and that the audience layer (replies) carries significantly more distortion than creator posts.
arXiv:2607. 21842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research on political polarization on social media depends on the ability to reliably measure partisanship in user-generated content.
The paper presents a red‑teaming framework to evaluate how open‑source large language models (LLMs) can be used for political influence, focusing on models that can be deployed locally without weight modifications. It measures LLM Overton Windows (OWs) to assess expression fidelity of sampled political opinions and examines how natural‑language jailbreaks alter these scores. The study evaluates over 30 LLMs from 10 families across five countries, finding that left‑leaning content is expressed with higher fidelity, larger models tend to have lower mean OW scores, and jailbreak effectiveness varies significantly between model families.
The paper investigates how to detect enthymemes—arguments with unstated premises or conclusions—in controversial political tweets about vaccination and immigration. Despite extensive fine‑tuning, models achieve an F1 score of only about 0.67, prompting the authors to propose new evaluation metrics that compare predictions to the full distribution of annotator votes and a model that directly predicts this distribution. The study also shows that models rely on explicit argumentative structure, often missing implicit links that readers must infer, raising concerns for content moderation systems that depend on majority labels.
The paper investigates why misinformation spreads more quickly on engagement‑based platforms by dissecting the recommendation algorithm of X. It identifies an engagement fungibility mechanism that rewards instant reactions (likes, retweets) over thoughtful engagement (replies, quotes), allowing misinformation—which tends to attract instant reactions—to receive more recommendations. The authors validate this mechanism through a simulation on the USC X 2024 election corpus, showing that adjusting metric weights has little effect, while requiring thoughtful engagement before amplification can significantly reduce the credibility exposure gap without harming mainstream content or engagement.
The study introduces a computational method to distinguish between antagonizing and criticizing rhetoric in political discourse on Twitter/X. Analyzing over 17 million tweets from German trending topics, it finds that roughly one‑third contain antagonizing rhetoric, which is more prevalent in trending discussions than in general Twitter traffic. Right‑leaning users use antagonizing language more than left‑leaning users, and both forms of rhetoric are amplified within political camps, with certain parties—AfD and the Greens—emerging as primary antagonists.
Can Humans Tell? A Dual-Axis Study of Human Perception of LLM-Generated News investigates whether people can distinguish news articles written by humans from those generated by large language models (LLMs). Using JudgeGPT, the study collected 2,318 judgments from 1,054 participants on content from six LLMs, finding that participants could not reliably differentiate machine-generated from human-written text. The research also shows that domain expertise predicts judgment accuracy, distinct response strategies exist, and accuracy declines after about 30 evaluations due to cognitive fatigue.
arXiv:2608. 15746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a forensic analysis of the generation pipeline behind a recent AI-driven influence campaign.
arXiv:2610.03077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Propaganda detection is an essential task in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in the context of manipulative political communications. H...
arXiv:2607. 14957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online firestorms are rapid collective escalations of highly negative user-generated content and may cause substantial reputational and economic damage.
arXiv:2602. 02838v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The detection of online influence operations -- coordinated campaigns by malicious actors to spread narratives -- has traditionally depended on content analysis or network features.
arXiv:2606. 02883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommender systems have grown from content-organization tools into sophisticated systems that shape daily behavior.
The study examines how political narratives formed and spread on X, Facebook, and Reddit during the 2024 Moldovan presidential election. Using multilingual stance detection, network analysis, and causal inference, it finds distinct cross‑platform differences in positions on European integration, Russia, and the candidates, and shows that amplification and peer exposure significantly reinforce these narratives. This is the first comprehensive analysis of social media discourse for this election, highlighting the role of language, network dynamics, and causal effects in shaping political influence.