Whose Values? Measuring the (Subjective) Expression of Basic Human Values in Social Media

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Epstein, Ziv, Jahanbakhsh, Farnaz, Piccardi, Tiziano, Gallegos, Isabel, Zhao, Dora, Ugander, Johan, Bernstein, Michael
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Epstein, Ziv
Jahanbakhsh, Farnaz
Piccardi, Tiziano
Gallegos, Isabel
Zhao, Dora
Ugander, Johan
Bernstein, Michael
author_facet Epstein, Ziv
Jahanbakhsh, Farnaz
Piccardi, Tiziano
Gallegos, Isabel
Zhao, Dora
Ugander, Johan
Bernstein, Michael
contents The value alignment of sociotechnical systems has become a central debate, but progress depends on how human values are perceived in the content these systems surface and how such perceptions can be measured at scale. Social media platforms are a prominent class of sociotechnical systems where algorithmic curation shapes exposure to value-laden content at scale. Large-language models offer new opportunities for measuring expressions of human values (e.g., humility or equality) in social media data, but value expressions can be subjective: different people will annotate the same post with different values. In this paper, we draw on the Schwartz value system as a broadly encompassing and theoretically grounded set of basic human values, and introduce a framework to personalize the measurement of expressions of Schwartz values in social media posts at scale. We collect 32,370 ground truth value expression annotations from N=1,079 people on 5,211 social media posts representative of real users' feeds. Due to the subjectivity of the task, we observe low levels of inter-rater agreement between people, and low agreement between human raters and LLM-based methods. In response, we construct a personalization architecture for classifying value expressions by learning from a small number of highly informative calibration annotations per user. In evaluation, we find that modeling these differences successfully yields value expression predictions that people agree with more than they agree with other people. These results contribute new methods and understanding for the measurement of human values in social media data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_08453
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Whose Values? Measuring the (Subjective) Expression of Basic Human Values in Social Media
Epstein, Ziv
Jahanbakhsh, Farnaz
Piccardi, Tiziano
Gallegos, Isabel
Zhao, Dora
Ugander, Johan
Bernstein, Michael
Social and Information Networks
The value alignment of sociotechnical systems has become a central debate, but progress depends on how human values are perceived in the content these systems surface and how such perceptions can be measured at scale. Social media platforms are a prominent class of sociotechnical systems where algorithmic curation shapes exposure to value-laden content at scale. Large-language models offer new opportunities for measuring expressions of human values (e.g., humility or equality) in social media data, but value expressions can be subjective: different people will annotate the same post with different values. In this paper, we draw on the Schwartz value system as a broadly encompassing and theoretically grounded set of basic human values, and introduce a framework to personalize the measurement of expressions of Schwartz values in social media posts at scale. We collect 32,370 ground truth value expression annotations from N=1,079 people on 5,211 social media posts representative of real users' feeds. Due to the subjectivity of the task, we observe low levels of inter-rater agreement between people, and low agreement between human raters and LLM-based methods. In response, we construct a personalization architecture for classifying value expressions by learning from a small number of highly informative calibration annotations per user. In evaluation, we find that modeling these differences successfully yields value expression predictions that people agree with more than they agree with other people. These results contribute new methods and understanding for the measurement of human values in social media data.
title Whose Values? Measuring the (Subjective) Expression of Basic Human Values in Social Media
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08453