The advent of large language models (LLMs) has marked a new era in the transformation of computational social science (CSS). This paper dives into the role of LLMs in CSS, particularly exploring their potential to revolutionize data analysis and content generation and contribute to a broader understanding of social phenomena. We begin by discussing the applications of LLMs in various computational problems in social science including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, stance and humor detection, misinformation detection, event understanding, and social network analysis, illustrating their capacity to generate nuanced insights into human behavior and societal trends. Furthermore, we explore the innovative use of LLMs in generating social media content. We also discuss the various ethical, technical, and legal issues these applications pose, and considerations required for responsible LLM usage. We further present the challenges associated with data bias, privacy, and the integration of these models into existing research frameworks. This paper aims to provide a solid background on the potential of LLMs in CSS, their past applications, current problems, and how they can pave the way for revolutionizing CSS.

This paper explores the dual role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of online misinformation and disinformation. In today’s digital landscape, where the internet and social media facilitate the rapid dissemination of information, discerning between accurate content and falsified information presents a formidable challenge. Misinformation, often arising unintentionally, and disinformation, crafted deliberately, are at the forefront of this challenge. LLMs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, equipped with advanced language generation abilities, present a double-edged sword in this scenario. While they hold promise in combating misinformation by fact-checking and detecting LLM-generated text, their ability to generate realistic, contextually relevant text also poses risks for creating and propagating misinformation. Further, LLMs are plagued with many problems such as biases, knowledge cutoffs, and hallucinations, which may further perpetuate misinformation and disinformation. The paper outlines historical developments in misinformation detection and how it affects social media consumption, especially among youth, and introduces LLMs and their applications in various domains. It then critically analyzes the potential of LLMs to generate and counter misinformation and disinformation in sensitive topics such as healthcare, COVID-19, and political agendas. Further, it discusses mitigation strategies, ethical considerations, and regulatory measures, summarizing previous methods and proposing future research direction toward leveraging the benefits of LLMs while minimizing misuse risks. The paper concludes by acknowledging LLMs as powerful tools with significant implications in both spreading and combating misinformation in the digital age.

In today’s social media-dominated landscape, digital platforms wield substantial influence over public opinion, particularly during crucial political events such as electoral processes. These platforms become hubs for diverse discussions, encompassing topics, reforms, and desired changes. Notably, in times of government dissatisfaction, they serve as arenas for anti-establishment discourse, highlighting the need to analyze public sentiment in these conversations. However, the analysis of such discourse is notably scarce, even in high-resource languages, and entirely non-existent in the context of the Nepali language. To address this critical gap, we present Nepal Anti Establishment discourse Tweets (NAET), a novel dataset comprising 4,445 multi-aspect annotated Nepali tweets, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of political conversations. Our contributions encompass evaluating tweet relevance, sentiment, and satire, while also exploring the presence of hate speech, identifying its targets, and distinguishing directed and non-directed expressions. Additionally, we investigate hope speech, an underexplored aspect crucial in the context of anti-establishment discourse, as it reflects the aspirations and expectations from new political figures and parties. Furthermore, we set NLP-based baselines for all these tasks. To ensure a holistic analysis, we also employ topic modeling, a powerful technique that helps us identify and understand the prevalent themes and patterns emerging from the discourse. Our research thus presents a comprehensive and multi-faceted perspective on anti-establishment election discourse in a low-resource language setting. The dataset is publicly available, facilitating in-depth analysis of political tweets in Nepali discourse and further advancing NLP research for the Nepali language through labeled data and baselines for various NLP tasks. The dataset for this work is made available at https://github.com/rkritesh210/NAET.

The use of social media during election campaigns has become increasingly popular. However, the unbridled nature of online discourse can lead to the propagation of hate speech, which has far-reaching implications for the democratic process. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are being used to counteract the spread of hate speech and promote healthy online discourse. Despite the increasing need for NLP techniques to combat hate speech, research on low-resource languages such as Nepali is limited, posing a challenge to the realization of the United Nations’ Leave No One Behind principle, which calls for inclusive development that benefits all individuals and communities, regardless of their backgrounds or circumstances. To bridge this gap, we introduce NEHATE, a large-scale manually annotated dataset of hate speech and its targets in Nepali local election discourse. The dataset comprises 13,505 tweets, annotated for hate speech with further sub-categorization of hate speech into targets such as community, individual, and organization. Benchmarking of the dataset with various algorithms has shown potential for performance improvement. We have made the dataset publicly available at https://github.com/shucoll/NEHate to promote further research and development, while also contributing to the UN SDGs aimed at fostering peaceful, inclusive societies, and justice and strong institutions.

In the ever-evolving landscape of online discourse and political dialogue, the rise of hate speech poses a significant challenge to maintaining a respectful and inclusive digital environment. The context becomes particularly complex when considering the Hindi language—a low-resource language with limited available data. To address this pressing concern, we introduce the CHUNAV dataset—a collection of 11,457 Hindi tweets gathered during assembly elections in various states. CHUNAV is purpose-built for hate speech categorization and the identification of target groups. The dataset is a valuable resource for exploring hate speech within the distinctive socio-political context of Indian elections. The tweets within CHUNAV have been meticulously categorized into “Hate” and “Non-Hate” labels, and further subdivided to pinpoint the specific targets of hate speech, including “Individual”, “Organization”, and “Community” labels (as shown in Figure 1). Furthermore, this paper presents multiple benchmark models for hate speech detection, along with an innovative ensemble and oversampling-based method. The paper also delves into the results of topic modeling, all aimed at effectively addressing hate speech and target identification in the Hindi language. This contribution seeks to advance the field of hate speech analysis and foster a safer and more inclusive online space within the distinctive realm of Indian Assembly Elections.