“Whose Side Are You On?” Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection

Muhammad Haroon, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Anshuman Chhabra


Abstract
The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM’s classification.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-ijcnlp.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
224–243
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.13/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Muhammad Haroon, Magdalena Wojcieszak, and Anshuman Chhabra. 2025. “Whose Side Are You On?” Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 224–243, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Whose Side Are You On?” Estimating Ideology of Political and News Content Using Large Language Models and Few-shot Demonstration Selection (Haroon et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.findings-ijcnlp.13.pdf