about
Vicarious Offense and Noise Audit of Offensive Speech Classifiers (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Feb 7, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: They compared how people and AI filters label political posts as offensive, and collected a new set of guesses about whether others would be offended. Labels varied wildly across AI filters, and neither people nor AI could predict others' reactions from their political leanings.

Abstract · Vicarious Offense and Noise Audit of Offensive Speech Classifiers: Unifying Human and Machine Disagreement on What is Offensive

Offensive speech detection is a key component of content moderation. However, what is offensive can be highly subjective. This paper investigates how machine and human moderators disagree on what is offensive when it comes to real-world social web political discourse. We show that (1) there is extensive disagreement among the moderators (humans and machines); and (2) human and large-language-model classifiers are unable to predict how other human raters will respond, based on their political leanings. For (1), we conduct a noise audit at an unprecedented scale that combines both machine and human responses. For (2), we introduce a first-of-its-kind dataset of vicarious offense. Our noise audit reveals that moderation outcomes vary wildly across different machine moderators. Our experiments with human moderators suggest that political leanings combined with sensitive issues affect both first-person and vicarious offense. The dataset is available through https://github.com/Homan-Lab/voiced.

Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Sujan Dutta, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Marcos Zampieri, Christopher M. Homan, Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh
arXiv:2301.12534 · cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG · submitted Jan 29, 2023 · updated Feb 3, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted at EMNLP 2023

add comment on HN

Abstract: This paper examines social web content moderation from two key perspectives: automated methods (machine moderators) and human evaluators (human moderators). We conduct a noise audit at an unprecedented scale using nine machine moderators trained on well-known offensive speech data sets evaluated on a corpus sampled from 92 million YouTube comments discussing a multitude of issues relevant to US politics. We introduce a first-of-its-kind data set of vicarious offense. We ask annotators: (1) if they find a given social media post offensive; and (2) how offensive annotators sharing different political beliefs would find the same content. Our experiments with machine moderators reveal that moderation outcomes wildly vary across different machine moderators. Our experiments with human moderators suggest that (1) political leanings considerably affect first-person offense perspective; (2) Republicans are the worst predictors of vicarious offense; (3) predicting vicarious offense for the Republicans is most challenging than predicting vicarious offense for the Independents and the Democrats; and (4) disagreement across political identity groups considerably increases when sensitive issues such as reproductive rights or gun control/rights are discussed. Both experiments suggest that offense, is indeed, highly subjective and raise important questions concerning content moderation practices.