Post-hoc Study of Climate Microtargeting on Social Media Ads with LLMs: Thematic Insights and Fairness Evaluation

Climate change communication on social media increasingly employs microtargeting strategies to effectively reach and influence specific demographic groups. This study presents a post-hoc analysis of microtargeting practices within climate campaigns by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to examine Facebook advertisements. Our analysis focuses on two key aspects: demographic targeting and fairness. We evaluate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict the intended demographic targets, such as gender and age group, achieving an overall accuracy of 88.55%. Furthermore, we instruct the LLMs to generate explanations for their classifications, providing transparent reasoning behind each decision. These explanations reveal the specific thematic elements used to engage different demographic segments, highlighting distinct strategies tailored to various audiences. Our findings show that young adults are primarily targeted through messages emphasizing activism and environmental consciousness, while women are engaged through themes related to caregiving roles and social advocacy. In addition to evaluating the effectiveness of LLMs in detecting microtargeted messaging, we conduct a comprehensive fairness analysis to identify potential biases in model predictions. Our findings indicate that while LLMs perform well overall, certain biases exist, particularly in the classification of senior citizens and male audiences. By showcasing the efficacy of LLMs in dissecting and explaining targeted communication strategies and by highlighting fairness concerns, this study provides a valuable framework for future research aimed at enhancing transparency, accountability, and inclusivity in social media-driven climate campaigns.

Uncovering Latent Arguments in Social Media Messaging by Employing LLMs-in-the-Loop Strategy

The widespread use of social media has led to a surge in popularity for automated methods of analyzing public opinion. Supervised methods are adept at text categorization, yet the dynamic nature of social media discussions poses a continual challenge for these techniques due to the constant shifting of the focus. On the other hand, traditional unsupervised methods for extracting themes from public discourse, such as topic modeling, often reveal overarching patterns that might not capture specific nuances. Consequently, a significant portion of research into social media discourse still depends on labor-intensive manual coding techniques and a human-in-the-loop approach, which are both time-consuming and costly. In this work, we study the problem of discovering arguments associated with a specific theme. We propose a generic LLMs-in-the-Loop strategy that leverages the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract latent arguments from social media messaging. To demonstrate our approach, we apply our framework to contentious topics. We use two publicly available datasets: (1) the climate campaigns dataset of 14k Facebook ads with 25 themes and (2) the COVID-19 vaccine campaigns dataset of 9k Facebook ads with 14 themes. Furthermore, we analyze demographic targeting and the adaptation of messaging based on real-world events.

Uncovering Latent Themes of Messaging on Social Media by Integrating LLMs: A Case Study on Climate Campaigns

This paper introduces a novel approach to uncovering and analyzing themes in social media messaging. Recognizing the limitations of traditional topic-level analysis, which tends to capture only the overarching patterns, this study emphasizes the need for a finer-grained, theme-focused exploration. Conventional methods of theme discovery, involving manual processes and a human-in-the-loop approach, are valuable but face challenges in scalability, consistency, and resource intensity in terms of time and cost. To address these challenges, we propose a machine-in-the-loop approach that leverages the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). This approach allows for a deeper investigation into the thematic aspects of social media discourse, enabling us to uncover a diverse array of themes, each with unique characteristics and relevance, thereby offering a comprehensive understanding of the nuances present within broader topics. Furthermore, this method efficiently maps the text and the newly discovered themes, enhancing our understanding of the thematic nuances in social media messaging. We employ climate campaigns as a case study and demonstrate that our methodology yields more accurate and interpretable results compared to traditional topic models. Our results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in uncovering latent themes but also illuminate how these themes are tailored for demographic targeting in social media contexts. Additionally, our work sheds light on the dynamic nature of social media, revealing the shifts in the thematic focus of messaging in response to real-world events.

Interactive Concept Learning for Uncovering Latent Themes in Large Text Collections

Experts across diverse disciplines are often interested in making sense of large text collections. Traditionally, this challenge is approached either by noisy unsupervised techniques such as topic models, or by following a manual theme discovery process. In this paper, we expand the definition of a theme to account for more than just a word distribution, and include generalized concepts deemed relevant by domain experts. Then, we propose an interactive framework that receives and encodes expert feedback at different levels of abstraction. Our framework strikes a balance between automation and manual coding, allowing experts to maintain control of their study while reducing the manual effort required.

Analysis of Climate Campaigns on Social Media using Bayesian Model Averaging

Climate change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment. Various interest groups, social movement organizations, and individuals engage in collective action on this issue on social media. In addition, issue advocacy campaigns on social media often arise in response to ongoing societal concerns, especially those faced by energy industries. Our goal in this paper is to analyze how those industries, their advocacy group, and climate advocacy group use social media to influence the narrative on climate change. In this work, we propose a minimally supervised model soup [56] approach combined with messaging themes to identify the stances of climate ads on Facebook. Finally, we release our stance dataset, model, and set of themes related to climate campaigns for future work on opinion mining and the automatic detection of climate change stances.

Weakly Supervised Learning for Analyzing Political Campaigns on Facebook

Social media platforms are currently the main channel for political messaging, allowing politicians to target specific demographics and adapt based on their reactions. However, making this communication transparent is challenging, as the messaging is tightly coupled with its intended audience and often echoed by multiple stakeholders interested in advancing specific policies. Our goal in this paper is to take a first step towards understanding these highly decentralized settings. We propose a weakly supervised approach to identify the stance and issue of political ads on Facebook and analyze how political campaigns use some kind of demographic targeting by location, gender, or age. Furthermore, we analyze the temporal dynamics of the political ads on election polls.

Understanding COVID-19 Vaccine Campaign on Facebook using Minimal Supervision

In the age of social media, where billions of internet users share information and opinions, the negative impact of pandemics is not limited to the physical world. It provokes a surge of incomplete, biased, and incorrect information, also known as an infodemic. This global infodemic jeopardizes measures to control the pandemic by creating panic, vaccine hesitancy, and fragmented social response. Platforms like Facebook allow advertisers to adapt their messaging to target different demographics and help alleviate or exacerbate the infodemic problem depending on their content. In this paper, we propose a minimally supervised multi-task learning framework for understanding messaging on Facebook related to the covid vaccine by identifying ad themes and moral foundations. Furthermore, we perform a more nuanced thematic analysis of messaging tactics of vaccine campaigns on social media so that policymakers can make better decisions on pandemic control.

A Holistic Framework for Analyzing the COVID-19 Vaccine Debate

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to infodemic of low quality information leading to poor health decisions. Combating the outcomes of this infodemic is not only a question of identifying false claims, but also reasoning about the decisions individuals make. In this work we propose a holistic analysis framework connecting stance and reason analysis, and fine-grained entity level moral sentiment analysis. We study how to model the dependencies between the different level of analysis and incorporate human insights into the learning process. Experiments show that our framework provides reliable predictions even in the low-supervision settings.

Twitter User Representation using Weakly Supervised Graph Embedding

Social media platforms provide convenient means for users to participate in multiple online activities on various contents and create fast widespread interactions. However, this rapidly growing access has also increased the diverse information, and characterizing user types to understand people's lifestyle decisions shared in social media is challenging. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised graph embedding based framework for understanding user types. We evaluate the user embedding learned using weak supervision over well-being related tweets from Twitter, focusing on 'Yoga', 'Keto diet'. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the baselines for detecting user types. Finally, we illustrate data analysis on different types of users (e.g., practitioner vs. promotional) from our dataset. While we focus on lifestyle-related tweets (i.e., yoga, keto), our method for constructing user representation readily generalizes to other domains.

Analysis of Twitter Users' Lifestyle Choices using Joint Embedding Model

Multiview representation learning of data can help construct coherent and contextualized users' representations on social media. This paper suggests a joint embedding model, incorporating users' social and textual information to learn contextualized user representations used for understanding their lifestyle choices. We apply our model to tweets related to two lifestyle activities, `Yoga' and `Keto diet' and use it to analyze users' activity type and motivation. We explain the data collection and annotation process in detail and provide an in-depth analysis of users from different classes based on their Twitter content. Our experiments show that our model results in performance improvements in both domains.