arXiv Computation and Language

Who's Behind It? Annotating and Extracting Conspiratorial Actors from German Telegram Posts

arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

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 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 AI
Jul 21

Posts of Peril: Detecting Information About Hazards in Text

arXiv:2405. 17838v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Socio-linguistic indicators of affectively-relevant phenomena, such as emotion or sentiment, are often extracted from text to better understand features of human-computer interactions, including on social media.

By Keith Burghardt, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Chyna Tang, Anne Pisor, Kristina Lerman
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Global Crises and National Policies: A Large Scale Analysis of Political Content in German Language Online Media

The study analyzes millions of German-language online articles and tweets from 2019–2022 to uncover political biases using automated text analysis. It finds that international events such as the COVID‑19 pandemic and the Ukraine war create thematic convergence between German and Swiss media, while domestic policy differences drive divergence in locally focused topics. Newspapers maintain more stable political content, whereas Twitter shows rapid, event‑driven spikes, illustrating how media platforms differ in intensity and timing.

By Yara D\"oring, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Automated Identification of Competing Narratives in Political Discourse on Social Media

The paper introduces an unsupervised framework that identifies and characterizes competing narratives in political discourse on social media, specifically analyzing German politicians' tweets. It uses a multi‑stage pipeline incorporating topic modeling, event detection, and event linking to form coherent stories and reveal distinct user community perspectives. Two case studies on polarizing issues demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in uncovering divergent viewpoints and framing conflicts around trending political topics.

By Sergej Wildemann, Erick Elejalde
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Geopolitical Divisions Across Languages in Large Language Models

The study examines how language influences AI chatbot responses to questions about the war in Ukraine, revealing that the same AI systems (GPT, Claude, Gemini) produce varying political stances across 112 languages. By evaluating 20 statements in 112 languages, the researchers found that Russia‑leaning versus Ukraine‑leaning answers differ by language, mirroring global political attitudes such as public support for Russia, UN voting patterns, and aid levels. This pattern persists across all three models and even when specific statement pairs are removed, suggesting that information warfare could embed geopolitical biases into AI training data.

By Maxim Chupilkin
arXiv AI
Aug 28

The BS-meter: Detecting Politics and Labour through ChatGPT's Language

The paper investigates the linguistic characteristics of ChatGPT-generated text, comparing it to 1,000 scientific publications and exploring its relation to concepts of ‘bullshit’ in political speech and workplace contexts. By applying hypothesis‑testing methods, the authors demonstrate that a statistical model of bullshit can link the artificial bullshit produced by ChatGPT to the political and workplace functions of bullshit observed in natural human language.

By Alessandro Trevisan, Harry Giddens, Sarah Dillon, Alan F. Blackwell
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Beyond the Rabbit Hole: Mapping the Relational Harms of QAnon Radicalization

The paper examines the relational harms of QAnon radicalization by analyzing 12,747 stories from the r/QAnonCasualties support group. Using a computational pipeline, the authors extract thematic traits, cluster them into six radicalization personas, and link these personas to specific emotional harms through LLM-assisted emotion detection and regression modeling. The study finds that certain personas predict distinct emotional outcomes, such as anger and disgust for ideologically driven radicalization, and fear and sadness for personal and cognitive collapse.

By Bich Ngoc Doan, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales, Giuseppe Russo