Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms

Rajvardhan Oak, Muhammad Haroon, Claire Wonjeong Jo, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Anshuman Chhabra


Abstract
Social media platforms utilize Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered recommendation algorithms to maximize user engagement, which can result in inadvertent exposure to harmful content. Current moderation efforts, reliant on classifiers trained with extensive human-annotated data, struggle with scalability and adapting to new forms of harm. To address these challenges, we propose a novel re-ranking approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Our method dynamically assesses and re-ranks content sequences, effectively mitigating harmful content exposure without requiring extensive labeled data. Alongside traditional ranking metrics, we also introduce two new metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of re-ranking in reducing exposure to harmful content. Through experiments on three datasets, three models and across three configurations, we demonstrate that our LLM-based approach significantly outperforms existing proprietary moderation approaches, offering a scalable and adaptable solution for harm mitigation.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
894–908
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.44/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rajvardhan Oak, Muhammad Haroon, Claire Wonjeong Jo, Magdalena Wojcieszak, and Anshuman Chhabra. 2025. Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 894–908, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms (Oak et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.44.pdf