Rishabh Kaushal

Catalina Goanta, Savvas Zannettou, Rishabh Kaushal et al.

To facilitate accountability and transparency, the Digital Services Act (DSA) sets up a process through which Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) need to grant vetted researchers access to their internal data (Article 40(4)). Operationalising such access is challenging for at least two reasons. First, data access is only available for research on systemic risks affecting European citizens, a concept with high levels of legal uncertainty. Second, data access suffers from an inherent standoff problem. Researchers need to request specific data but are not in a position to know all internal data processed by VLOPs, who, in turn, expect data specificity for potential access. In light of these limitations, data access under the DSA remains a mystery. To contribute to the discussion of how Article 40 can be interpreted and applied, we provide a concrete illustration of what data access can look like in a real-world systemic risk case study. We focus on the 2024 Romanian presidential election interference incident, the first event of its kind to trigger systemic risk investigations by the European Commission. During the elections, one candidate is said to have benefited from TikTok algorithmic amplification through a complex dis- and misinformation campaign. By analysing this incident, we can comprehend election-related systemic risk to explore practical research tasks and compare necessary data with available TikTok data. In particular, we make two contributions: (i) we combine insights from law, computer science and platform governance to shed light on the complexities of studying systemic risks in the context of election interference, focusing on two relevant factors: platform manipulation and hidden advertising; and (ii) we provide practical insights into various categories of available data for the study of TikTok, based on platform documentation, data donations and the Research API.

Thales Bertaglia, Lily Heisig, Rishabh Kaushal et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) raise concerns about lowering the cost of generating texts that could be used for unethical or illegal purposes, especially on social media. This paper investigates the promise of such models to help enforce legal requirements related to the disclosure of sponsored content online. We investigate the use of LLMs for generating synthetic Instagram captions with two objectives: The first objective (fidelity) is to produce realistic synthetic datasets. For this, we implement content-level and network-level metrics to assess whether synthetic captions are realistic. The second objective (utility) is to create synthetic data that is useful for sponsored content detection. For this, we evaluate the effectiveness of the generated synthetic data for training classifiers to identify undisclosed advertisements on Instagram. Our investigations show that the objectives of fidelity and utility may conflict and that prompt engineering is a useful but insufficient strategy. Additionally, we find that while individual synthetic posts may appear realistic, collectively they lack diversity, topic connectivity, and realistic user interaction patterns.

Julie Bauer, Rishabh Kaushal, Thales Bertaglia et al.

Numerous studies have proposed computational methods to detect hate speech online, yet most focus on the English language and emphasize model development. In this study, we evaluate the counterfactual fairness of hate speech detection models in the Dutch language, specifically examining the performance and fairness of transformer-based models. We make the following key contributions. First, we curate a list of Dutch Social Group Terms that reflect social context. Second, we generate counterfactual data for Dutch hate speech using LLMs and established strategies like Manual Group Substitution (MGS) and Sentence Log-Likelihood (SLL). Through qualitative evaluation, we highlight the challenges of generating realistic counterfactuals, particularly with Dutch grammar and contextual coherence. Third, we fine-tune baseline transformer-based models with counterfactual data and evaluate their performance in detecting hate speech. Fourth, we assess the fairness of these models using Counterfactual Token Fairness (CTF) and group fairness metrics, including equality of odds and demographic parity. Our analysis shows that models perform better in terms of hate speech detection, average counterfactual fairness and group fairness. This work addresses a significant gap in the literature on counterfactual fairness for hate speech detection in Dutch and provides practical insights and recommendations for improving both model performance and fairness.

Henry Tari, Nojus Sereiva, Rishabh Kaushal et al.

Social media datasets are essential for research on a variety of topics, such as disinformation, influence operations, hate speech detection, or influencer marketing practices. However, access to social media datasets is often constrained due to costs and platform restrictions. Acquiring datasets that span multiple platforms, which is crucial for understanding the digital ecosystem, is particularly challenging. This paper explores the potential of large language models to create lexically and semantically relevant social media datasets across multiple platforms, aiming to match the quality of real data. We propose multi-platform topic-based prompting and employ various language models to generate synthetic data from two real datasets, each consisting of posts from three different social media platforms. We assess the lexical and semantic properties of the synthetic data and compare them with those of the real data. Our empirical findings show that using large language models to generate synthetic multi-platform social media data is promising, different language models perform differently in terms of fidelity, and a post-processing approach might be needed for generating high-fidelity synthetic datasets for research. In addition to the empirical evaluation of three state of the art large language models, our contributions include new fidelity metrics specific to multi-platform social media datasets.