Milena Pustet

Elisabeth Steffen, Helena Mihaljević, Milena Pustet et al.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, existing conspiracy theories were refreshed and new ones were created, often interwoven with antisemitic narratives, stereotypes and codes. The sheer volume of antisemitic and conspiracy theory content on the Internet makes data-driven algorithmic approaches essential for anti-discrimination organizations and researchers alike. However, the manifestation and dissemination of these two interrelated phenomena is still quite under-researched in scholarly empirical research of large text corpora. Algorithmic approaches for the detection and classification of specific contents usually require labeled datasets, annotated based on conceptually sound guidelines. While there is a growing number of datasets for the more general phenomenon of hate speech, the development of corpora and annotation guidelines for antisemitic and conspiracy content is still in its infancy, especially for languages other than English. We contribute to closing this gap by developing an annotation guide for antisemitic and conspiracy theory online content in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We provide working definitions, including specific forms of antisemitism such as encoded and post-Holocaust antisemitism. We use these to annotate a German-language dataset consisting of ~3,700 Telegram messages sent between 03/2020 and 12/2021.

Milena Pustet, Elisabeth Steffen, Helena Mihaljević et al.

The role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in monitoring harmful online content is increasingly crucial, especially as platform providers reduce their investment in content moderation. AI tools can assist in detecting and monitoring harmful content at scale. However, few open-source tools offer seamless integration of AI models and social media monitoring infrastructures. Given their thematic expertise and contextual understanding of harmful content, CSOs should be active partners in co-developing technological tools, providing feedback, helping to improve models, and ensuring alignment with stakeholder needs and values, rather than as passive 'consumers'. However, collaborations between the open source community, academia, and civil society remain rare, and research on harmful content seldom translates into practical tools usable by civil society actors. This work in progress explores how CSOs can be meaningfully involved in an AI-assisted open-source monitoring tool of anti-democratic movements on Telegram, which we are currently developing in collaboration with CSO stakeholders.

Milena Pustet, Elisabeth Steffen, Helena Mihaljević

The automated detection of conspiracy theories online typically relies on supervised learning. However, creating respective training data requires expertise, time and mental resilience, given the often harmful content. Moreover, available datasets are predominantly in English and often keyword-based, introducing a token-level bias into the models. Our work addresses the task of detecting conspiracy theories in German Telegram messages. We compare the performance of supervised fine-tuning approaches using BERT-like models with prompt-based approaches using Llama2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 which require little or no additional training data. We use a dataset of $\sim\!\! 4,000$ messages collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, without the use of keyword filters. Our findings demonstrate that both approaches can be leveraged effectively: For supervised fine-tuning, we report an F1 score of $\sim\!\! 0.8$ for the positive class, making our model comparable to recent models trained on keyword-focused English corpora. We demonstrate our model's adaptability to intra-domain temporal shifts, achieving F1 scores of $\sim\!\! 0.7$. Among prompting variants, the best model is GPT-4, achieving an F1 score of $\sim\!\! 0.8$ for the positive class in a zero-shot setting and equipped with a custom conspiracy theory definition.