"Whose Side Are You On?" Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection

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Main Authors: Haroon, Muhammad, Wojcieszak, Magdalena, Chhabra, Anshuman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Haroon, Muhammad
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
Chhabra, Anshuman
author_facet Haroon, Muhammad
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
Chhabra, Anshuman
contents The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM's classification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20797
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle "Whose Side Are You On?" Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection
Haroon, Muhammad
Wojcieszak, Magdalena
Chhabra, Anshuman
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM's classification.
title "Whose Side Are You On?" Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20797