Workshop Proceedings of the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: CySoc 2025: 6th International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats

DOI: 10.36190/2025.11

Published: 2025-06-05
Navigating Hate Speech: Bridging LLMs and Human Expertise in Public Officials’ Online Communication
Nitheesha Nakka, Isaac Pollert, Lingyu Fuca, Cassandra Tai

The rise in hate speech targeting minority communities underscores the urgent need for effective tools to detect and address harmful content in digital communication. We examine over 3 million tweets posted by state legislators between 2020 and 2021, focusing on messages directed at Asian communities. To address the nuanced nature of hate speech, we develop three comprehensive definitions for identifying hate speech. With human-in-the-loop, our fine-tuned BERT-NLI model achieved improved classification performance. We find that while Anti-Asian tweets comprise only a small portion of legislato...