SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Pandey, Punya Syon, Le, Hai Son, Bhardwaj, Devansh, Mihalcea, Rada, Jin, Zhijing
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Pandey, Punya Syon
Le, Hai Son
Bhardwaj, Devansh
Mihalcea, Rada
Jin, Zhijing
author_facet Pandey, Punya Syon
Le, Hai Son
Bhardwaj, Devansh
Mihalcea, Rada
Jin, Zhijing
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in contexts where their failures can have direct sociopolitical consequences. Yet, existing safety benchmarks rarely test vulnerabilities in domains such as political manipulation, propaganda and disinformation generation, or surveillance and information control. We introduce SocialHarmBench, a dataset of 585 prompts spanning 7 sociopolitical categories and 34 countries, designed to surface where LLMs most acutely fail in politically charged contexts. Our evaluations reveal several shortcomings: open-weight models exhibit high vulnerability to harmful compliance, with Mistral-7B reaching attack success rates as high as 97% to 98% in domains such as historical revisionism, propaganda, and political manipulation. Moreover, temporal and geographic analyses show that LLMs are most fragile when confronted with 21st-century or pre-20th-century contexts, and when responding to prompts tied to regions such as Latin America, the USA, and the UK. These findings demonstrate that current safeguards fail to generalize to high-stakes sociopolitical settings, exposing systematic biases and raising concerns about the reliability of LLMs in preserving human rights and democratic values. We share the SocialHarmBench benchmark at https://huggingface.co/datasets/psyonp/SocialHarmBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04891
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests
Pandey, Punya Syon
Le, Hai Son
Bhardwaj, Devansh
Mihalcea, Rada
Jin, Zhijing
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in contexts where their failures can have direct sociopolitical consequences. Yet, existing safety benchmarks rarely test vulnerabilities in domains such as political manipulation, propaganda and disinformation generation, or surveillance and information control. We introduce SocialHarmBench, a dataset of 585 prompts spanning 7 sociopolitical categories and 34 countries, designed to surface where LLMs most acutely fail in politically charged contexts. Our evaluations reveal several shortcomings: open-weight models exhibit high vulnerability to harmful compliance, with Mistral-7B reaching attack success rates as high as 97% to 98% in domains such as historical revisionism, propaganda, and political manipulation. Moreover, temporal and geographic analyses show that LLMs are most fragile when confronted with 21st-century or pre-20th-century contexts, and when responding to prompts tied to regions such as Latin America, the USA, and the UK. These findings demonstrate that current safeguards fail to generalize to high-stakes sociopolitical settings, exposing systematic biases and raising concerns about the reliability of LLMs in preserving human rights and democratic values. We share the SocialHarmBench benchmark at https://huggingface.co/datasets/psyonp/SocialHarmBench.
title SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04891