arXiv Computation and Language

Unmasking Propaganda: A Comparative Analysis of Masked and Causal Language Models

arXiv AI
Aug 18

Propaganda Forensics: Recovering the Generation Pipeline of an AI-Driven Influence Campaign

arXiv:2608. 15746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a forensic analysis of the generation pipeline behind a recent AI-driven influence campaign.

By Benjamin Icard, Elouan Vuichard, Louis Lefebvre, Lila Sainero, Thomas Girault, Alice Breton, Tanguy Launay, Gauvain Bourgne, Morgane Casanova, Guillaume Gadek, Victor Kl\"otzer, Michel Le Nouy, Guillaume Gravier, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Paul \'Egr\'e
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

SWARM: A Multilingual Human-Annotated Dataset for Russian Propaganda Detection in Search Engine Results

The paper introduces SWARM, a multilingual dataset of 2,183 search engine results in nine languages, annotated for support of Russian propaganda narratives. It evaluates a source-based blocklist, supervised classifiers, and zero‑shot large language models, finding that blocklists miss most propaganda and that content‑level models vary in performance, with the best LLM achieving an F1 of 0.73. The study highlights the need for per‑language, content‑level detection of search‑borne propaganda.

By Manuel Tonneau, Abhinav Dubey, Farhan Shaikh, Ilaria Vitulano, Martha Stolze, Hale Dedeoglu, Clara Riechert, Ella Kuka, Maryna Sydorova, Mykola Makhortykh, Elizaveta Kuznetsova
arXiv AI
2d ago

UkrMeme: Multimodal Explainable Persuasion Detection in Ukrainian Memes

The paper introduces UkrMeme, a dataset of 200 Ukrainian wartime memes annotated for persuasive techniques, and PTM-UA, a Ukrainian translation of a subset of the Propaganda 950 benchmark that retains the original visual content. The authors evaluate vision‑language models in a zero‑shot prompting setup across image, text, and multimodal inputs using hierarchical F1 metrics. They also compare Layer‑wise Relevance Propagation and model‑generated token attributions to analyze the semantic categories of evidence emphasized by each explanation method.

By Nazar Andrushko, Vera Schmitt, Veronika Solopova
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Agentic Detection of Online Conspiracies

The paper presents an agentic framework for detecting conspiratorial content in social media by inferring the speaker’s intent rather than merely identifying explicit claims. It leverages social context and adaptive tool use, demonstrating superior performance over text-only and non-agentic models on a large Hebrew tweet dataset spanning election cycles and the COVID pandemic. The study highlights the importance of context-aware, reasoning-driven approaches for accurate conspiracy detection.

By Lior Biton, Oren Tsur
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations

ProBel is a bilingual Arabic and English resource for propaganda detection that aligns binary labels, multi-label annotations for 23 propaganda techniques grouped into six categories, technique-labeled spans, and reference explanations for news sentences. The dataset supports matched binary, coarse-grained, multi-label, and span-level tasks in both languages, and the authors evaluate zero‑shot prompting, task‑specific fine‑tuning, and joint training. A single bilingual multi‑task model achieves the best overall performance, with cross‑task analysis revealing that joint classification preserves binary performance while span‑only training can weaken sentence‑level prediction, and that joint bilingual training yields the most stable results.

By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Framing by Wording, Framing by Selection: A Large-Scale Two-Dimensional Audit of French News Headlines, 2022-2025

The study introduces a two‑dimensional framework to audit French news headlines, distinguishing salience framing—captured by four wording devices—from selection framing—captured by outlet‑level story form and high‑charge distributions. Using a 10,000‑headline supervision set annotated by LLMs and human arbitration, the authors classify 902,111 headlines from 25 outlets (2022‑2025) and find that salience and selection diverge yet correlate, that default thresholds inflate salience estimates, and that headlines mentioning Jews, the Far‑right, and Muslims exhibit the highest salience rates. The authors release their dataset, lexicons, and code, claiming it is the largest French headline framing audit to date.

By Amr Sobhy
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Inference-Time Mitigation of Adversarial Political Bias in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become the mainstay for information retrieval and summarization tasks, ensuring that they are always non-partisan and invulnerable to political bias is a critical step towards safer and more trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Bruce Coburn, Bryce J. Dietrich, Robert X. Browning, Edward J. Delp, Fengqing Zhu