As LLM-generated content proliferates online, texts are increasingly subject to repeated processing and translation by models, making it critical to understand how such iterative reprocessing reshapes language. Prior work has shown that this degrades factual content and reduces diversity, but the fine-grained linguistic shifts underlying these effects remain unexplored. We track changes in epistemic markers, grammatical voice, degree adverbs, and nominalisation density across 12 iterations of round-trip translation applied to 600 BBC News articles, varying intermediate language, translation model, and chain topology across 17 experimental configurations. We find a consistent epistemic shift: evidential and factive markers increase while hedges decline, potentially causing tentative claims to read as more certain. Concurrently, texts undergo register-level formalisation—informal degree adverbs give way to formal alternatives, active-voice density drops, by-phrase passives attrite disproportionately, and nominalisation density rises. We also record clear model-specific patterns for certain settings. These shifts erode the markers of source, register, and agency, offering a fine-grained account of the factual degradation reported in previous studies.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilised for social simulation and persona generation, necessitating an understanding of how they represent geopolitical identities. In this paper, we analyse personas generated for Palestinian and Israeli identities by five popular LLMs across 640 experimental conditions, varying context (war vs non-war) and assigned roles. We observe significant distributional patterns in the generated attributes: Palestinian profiles in war contexts are frequently associated with lower socioeconomic status and survival-oriented roles, whereas Israeli profiles predominantly retain middle-class status and specialised professional attributes. When prompted with explicit instructions to avoid harmful assumptions, models exhibit diverse distributional changes, e.g., marked increases in non-binary gender inferences or a convergence toward generic occupational roles (e.g., "student"), while the underlying socioeconomic distinctions often remain. Furthermore, analysis of reasoning traces reveals an interesting dynamics between model reasoning and generation: while rationales consistently mention fairness-related concepts, the final generated personas follow the aforementioned diverse distributional changes. These findings illustrate a picture of how models interpret geopolitical contexts, while suggesting that they process fairness and adjust in varied ways; there is no consistent, direct translation of fairness concepts into representative outcomes.

In the stance detection task, a text is classified as either favorable, opposing, or neutral towards a target. Prior work suggests that the use of external information, e.g., excerpts from Wikipedia, improves stance detection performance. However, whether or not such information can benefit large language models (LLMs) remains an unanswered question, despite their wide adoption in many reasoning tasks. In this study, we conduct a systematic evaluation on how Wikipedia and web search external information can affect stance detection across eight LLMs and in three datasets with 12 targets. Surprisingly, we find that such information degrades performance in most cases, with macro F1 scores dropping by up to 27.9%. We explain this through experiments showing LLMs’ tendency to align their predictions with the stance and sentiment of the provided information rather than the ground truth stance of the given text. We also find that performance degradation persists with chain-of-thought prompting, while fine-tuning mitigates but does not fully eliminate it. Our findings, in contrast to previous literature on BERT-based systems which suggests that external information enhances performance, highlight the risks of information biases in LLM-based stance classifiers.