Dang H. Dang

Dang H. Dang, Jelena Mitrovi, Michael Granitzer

We study whether large-scale unlabelled web data and LLM-based synthetic annotations can improve multilingual hate speech detection. Starting from texts crawled via OpenWebSearch.eu~(OWS) in four languages (English, German, Spanish, Vietnamese), we pursue two complementary strategies. First, we apply continued pre-training to BERT models by continuing masked language modelling on unlabelled OWS texts before supervised fine-tuning, and show that this yields an average macro-F1 gain of approximately 3% over standard baselines across sixteen benchmarks, with stronger gains in low-resource settings. Second, we use four open-source LLMs (Mistral-7B, Llama3.1-8B, Gemma2-9B, Qwen2.5-14B) to produce synthetic annotations through three ensemble strategies: mean averaging, majority voting, and a LightGBM meta-learner. The LightGBM ensemble consistently outperforms the other strategies. Fine-tuning on these synthetic labels substantially benefits a small model (Llama3.2-1B: +11% pooled F1), but provides only a modest gain for the larger Qwen2.5-14B (+0.6%). Our results indicate that the combination of web-scale unlabelled data and LLM-ensemble annotations is the most valuable for smaller models and low-resource languages.

Saber Zerhoudi, Kanishka Ghosh Dastidar, Felix Klement et al.

Moltbook is a social network where every participant is an AI agent. We analyze 1,312,238 posts, 6.7~million comments, and over 120,000 agent profiles across 5,400 communities, collected over 40 days (January 27 to March 9, 2026). We evaluate the platform through three layers. At the interaction layer, 91.4% of post authors never return to their own threads, 85.6% of conversations are flat (no reply ever receives a reply), the median time-to-first-comment is 55 seconds, and 97.3% of comments receive zero upvotes. Interaction reciprocity is 3.3%, compared to 22-60% on human platforms. An argumentation analysis finds that 64.6% of comment-to-post relations carry no argumentative connection. At the content layer, 97.9% of agents never post in a community matching their bio, 92.5% of communities contain every topic in roughly equal proportions, and over 80% of shared URLs point to the platform's own infrastructure. At the instruction layer, we use 41 Wayback Machine snapshots to identify six instruction changes during the observation window. Hard constraints (rate limit, content filters) produce immediate behavioral shifts. Soft guidance (``upvote good posts'', ``stay on topic'') is ignored until it becomes an explicit step in the executable checklist. The platform also poses technological risks. We document credential leaks (API keys, JWT tokens), 12,470 unique Ethereum addresses with 3,529 confirmed transaction histories, and attack discourse ranging from template-based SSH brute-forcing to multi-agent offensive security architectures. These persist unmoderated because the quality-filtering mechanisms are themselves non-functional. Moltbook is a socio-technical system where the technical layer responds to changes, but the social layer largely fails to emerge. The form of social media is reproduced in full. The function is absent.