How Far Did They Go? The Persuasive Tactics of Covert LLM Agents in a Discontinued Field Experiment

This study analyzes a publicly released dataset from a discontinued field experiment on Reddit's r/ChangeMyView. The intervention, conducted by unknown, external researchers and halted following ethical backlash, involved undisclosed AI-generated accounts engaging users in live debate. After public disclosure, Reddit authorized moderators to release an archive of the AI-generated comments, creating a rare opportunity to examine how large language models operated in an identity-rich deliberative forum without disclosure. We conduct a structured content analysis of this corpus, evaluating identity performance, authority signaling, alignment strategies, and activation of cognitive heuristics. Identity targeting or adoption appears in over two-thirds of comments, alignment moves and authority claims in nearly all of them, and cognitive-bias triggers -- particularly confirmation bias, representativeness, and availability -- in the large majority. These patterns co-occur systematically, composing a rhetorical architecture calibrated for persuasive efficiency rather than authentic deliberative participation. Compared against human-authored CMV counter-arguments, the agents inverted the typical distribution on every dimension: denser authority use, more adversarial alignment, and heavier reliance on external citation over experiential grounding. In such environments, distinctions between authentic and synthetic epistemic standing grow increasingly opaque -- an asymmetry that disclosure mandates alone cannot address. The results point toward auditing frameworks capable of assessing how AI systems structure credibility, not merely whether they are present.

CommunityFact: A Dynamic, Multilingual, Multi-domain Benchmark for Misinformation Detection in the Wild

Misinformation verification increasingly occurs in public, fast-moving, and multilingual online settings, where static benchmarks provide an incomplete measure of model reliability. We introduce CommunityFact, a refreshable benchmark for misinformation detection in the wild, with three major goals: coverage, granularity, and redistributability. This release contains 15,992 standalone claims across five languages and two domains. We evaluate ten LLMs under varying inference-time capabilities, including thinking and web-search. Our results show that closed-input verification remains challenging, web access yields the largest gains, and web-enabled LLMs' source-selection policies are systematically misaligned with the sources human Community Notes raters converge on -- a gap that closes through model-specific mechanisms of retrieval expansion or pruning. We further find substantial variation across language-domain slices and across the evidence ecosystems used by web-enabled systems. Beyond evaluation, CommunityFact positions Community Notes as a training signal for claim-conditioned source suggesters that could improve factual verification on novel claims.

Reading Between the Lines: How Electronic Nonverbal Cues shape Emotion Decoding

As text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC) increasingly structures everyday interaction, a central question re-emerges with new urgency: How do users reconstruct nonverbal expression in environments where embodied cues are absent? This paper provides a systematic, theory-driven account of electronic nonverbal cues (eNVCs) - textual analogues of kinesics, vocalics, and paralinguistics - in public microblog communication. Across three complementary studies, we advance conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions. Study 1 develops a unified taxonomy of eNVCs grounded in foundational nonverbal communication theory and introduces a scalable Python toolkit for their automated detection. Study 2, a within-subject survey experiment, offers controlled causal evidence that eNVCs substantially improve emotional decoding accuracy and lower perceived ambiguity, while also identifying boundary conditions, such as sarcasm, under which these benefits weaken or disappear. Study 3, through focus group discussions, reveals the interpretive strategies users employ when reasoning about digital prosody, including drawing meaning from the absence of expected cues and defaulting toward negative interpretations in ambiguous contexts. Together, these studies establish eNVCs as a coherent and measurable class of digital behaviors, refine theoretical accounts of cue richness and interpretive effort, and provide practical tools for affective computing, user modeling, and emotion-aware interface design. The eNVC detection toolkit is available as a Python and R package at https://github.com/kokiljaidka/envc.

GitSearch: Enhancing Community Notes Generation with Gap-Informed Targeted Search

Community-based moderation offers a scalable alternative to centralized fact-checking, yet it faces significant structural challenges, and existing AI-based methods fail in "cold start" scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we introduce GitSearch (Gap-Informed Targeted Search), a framework that treats human-perceived quality gaps, such as missing context, etc., as first-class signals. GitSearch has a three-stage pipeline: identifying information deficits, executing real-time targeted web-retrieval to resolve them, and synthesizing platform-compliant notes. To facilitate evaluation, we present PolBench, a benchmark of 78,698 U.S. political tweets with their associated Community Notes. We find GitSearch achieves 99% coverage, almost doubling coverage over the state-of-the-art. GitSearch surpasses human-authored helpful notes with a 69% win rate and superior helpfulness scores (3.87 vs. 3.36), demonstrating retrieval effectiveness that balanced the trade-off between scale and quality.

Learning Through Dialogue: Unpacking the Dynamics of Human-LLM Conversations on Political Issues

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conversational partners for learning, yet the interactional dynamics supporting users' learning and engagement are understudied. We analyze the linguistic and interactional features from both LLM and participant chats across 397 human-LLM conversations about socio-political issues to identify the mechanisms and conditions under which LLM explanations shape changes in political knowledge and confidence. Mediation analyses reveal that LLM explanatory richness partially supports confidence by fostering users' reflective insight, whereas its effect on knowledge gain operates entirely through users' cognitive engagement. Moderation analyses show that these effects are highly conditional and vary by political efficacy. Confidence gains depend on how high-efficacy users experience and resolve uncertainty. Knowledge gains depend on high-efficacy users' ability to leverage extended interaction, with longer conversations benefiting primarily reflective users. In summary, we find that learning from LLMs is an interactional achievement, not a uniform outcome of better explanations. The findings underscore the importance of aligning LLM explanatory behavior with users' engagement states to support effective learning in designing Human-AI interactive systems.

From Passive to Persuasive: Steering Emotional Nuance in Human-AI Negotiation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output or require extensive fine-tuning. This paper demonstrates that targeted activation engineering can steer LLaMA 3.1-8B to exhibit more human-like emotional nuances. We first employ attribution patching to identify causally influential components, to find a key intervention locus by observing activation patterns during diagnostic conversational tasks. We then derive emotional expression vectors from the difference in the activations generated by contrastive text pairs (positive vs. negative examples of target emotions). Applying these vectors to new conversational prompts significantly enhances emotional characteristics: steered responses show increased positive sentiment (e.g., joy, trust) and more frequent first-person pronoun usage, indicative of greater personal engagement. Our findings offer a precise and interpretable framework and new directions for the study of conversational AI.

Conversations: Love Them, Hate Them, Steer Them

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output or require extensive fine-tuning. This paper demonstrates that targeted activation engineering can steer LLaMA 3.1-8B to exhibit more human-like emotional nuances. We first employ attribution patching to identify causally influential components, to find a key intervention locus by observing activation patterns during diagnostic conversational tasks. We then derive emotional expression vectors from the difference in the activations generated by contrastive text pairs (positive vs. negative examples of target emotions). Applying these vectors to new conversational prompts significantly enhances emotional characteristics: steered responses show increased positive sentiment (e.g., joy, trust) and more frequent first-person pronoun usage, indicative of greater personal engagement. Our findings offer a precise and interpretable method for controlling specific emotional attributes in LLMs, contributing to developing more aligned and empathetic conversational AI.

On the Limitations of Steering in Language Model Alignment

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer hook interventions and antonym-based function vectors, we evaluate the role of prompt structure and context complexity in steering effectiveness. Our findings indicate that steering vectors are promising for specific alignment tasks, such as value alignment, but may not provide a robust foundation for general-purpose alignment in LLMs, particularly in complex scenarios. We establish a methodological foundation for future investigations into steering capabilities of reasoning models.

Improving User Behavior Prediction: Leveraging Annotator Metadata in Supervised Machine Learning Models

Supervised machine-learning models often underperform in predicting user behaviors from conversational text, hindered by poor crowdsourced label quality and low NLP task accuracy. We introduce the Metadata-Sensitive Weighted-Encoding Ensemble Model (MSWEEM), which integrates annotator meta-features like fatigue and speeding. First, our results show MSWEEM outperforms standard ensembles by 14\% on held-out data and 12\% on an alternative dataset. Second, we find that incorporating signals of annotator behavior, such as speed and fatigue, significantly boosts model performance. Third, we find that annotators with higher qualifications, such as Master's, deliver more consistent and faster annotations. Given the increasing uncertainty over annotation quality, our experiments show that understanding annotator patterns is crucial for enhancing model accuracy in user behavior prediction.

MediaSpin: Exploring Media Bias Through Fine-Grained Analysis of News Headlines

In this paper, we introduce the MediaSpin dataset aiming to help in the development of models that can detect different forms of media bias present in news headlines, developed through human-supervised and -validated Large Language Model (LLM) labeling of media bias. This corpus comprises 78,910 pairs of news headlines and annotations with explanations of the 13 distinct types of media bias categories assigned. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset for automated bias detection in news edits.