IYKYK (But AI Doesn't): Automated Content Moderation Does Not Capture Communities' Heterogeneous Attitudes Towards Reclaimed Language
Authors: Christina Chance, Rebecca Pattichis, Arjun Subramonian, James He, Shruti Narayanan, Saadia Gabriel, Kai-Wei Chang
Organizations: University of California Los Angeles, USA · Independent Researcher, USA
Abstract
Reclaimed slur usage is a common and meaningful practice online for many marginalized communities. It serves as a source of solidarity, identity, and shared experience. However, contemporary automated and AI-based moderation tools for online content largely fail to distinguish between reclaimed and hateful uses of slurs, resulting in the suppression of marginalized voices. In this work, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the attitudes of social media users in LGBTQIA+, Black, and women communities around reclaimed slurs targeting our focus groups including the f-word, n-word, and b-word. With social media users from these communities, we collect and analyze an annotated online slur usage corpus. The corpus includes annotators' perceptions of whether an online text containing a slur should be flagged as hate speech, as well as contextual features of the slur usage. Across all communities and annotation questions, we observe low inter-annotator agreement, indicating substantial disagreement among in-group annotators. This is compounded by the fact that, absent clear contextual signals of identity and intent, even in-group members may disagree on how to interpret reclaimed slur usage online. Semi-structured interviews with annotators suggest that differences in lived experience and personal history contribute to this variation as well. We find poor alignment between annotator judgments and automated hate speech assessments produced by Perspective API. We further observe that certain features of a text such as whether the slur usage was derogatory and if the slur was targeted at oneself are more associated with whether annotators report the text as hate speech. Together, these findings highlight the inherent subjectivity and contextual nature of how marginalized communities interpret slurs online.
This paper presents a multi-stage framework for detecting reclaimed slurs in multilingual social media discourse. It addresses the challenge of identifying reclamatory versus non-reclamatory usage of LGBTQ+-related slurs across English, Spanish, and Italian tweets. The framework handles three intertwined methodological challenges like data scarcity, class imbalance, and cross-linguistic variation in sentiment expression. It integrates data-driven model selection via cross-validation, semantic-preserving augmentation through back-translation, inductive transfer learning with dynamic epoch-level undersampling, and domain-specific knowledge injection via masked language modeling. Eight multilingual embedding models were evaluated systematically, with XLM-RoBERTa selected as the foundation model based on macro-averaged F1 score. Data augmentation via GPT-4o-mini back-translation to alternate languages effectively tripled the training corpus while preserving semantic content and class distribution ratios. The framework produces four final runs for the evaluation purposes where RUN 1 is inductive transfer learning with augmentation and undersampling, RUN 2 with masked language modeling pre-training, RUN 3 and RUN 4 are previous predictions refined via language-specific decision thresholds optimized via ROC analysis. Language-specific threshold refinement reveals that optimal decision boundaries vary significantly across languages. This reflects distributional differences in model confidence scores and linguistic variation in reclamatory language usage. The threshold-based optimization yields 2-5% absolute F1 improvement without requiring model retraining. The methodology is fully reproducible, with all code and experimental setup available at https://github.com/rbg-research/MultiPRIDE-Evalita-2026.
Barathi Ganesh HB, Michal Ptaszynski, Rene Melendez +1
Hate speech detection is inherently subjective: people from different demographic groups perceive the same content very differently. Collecting enough annotations from multiple demographic groups is costly and difficult to scale. Persona-conditioned Large Language Models (models prompted to adopt a specific demographic identity) have been proposed as a way to simulate diverse perspectives at scale. But do they actually reflect how different groups disagree? We evaluate three aspects of human social judgement: (i) whether personas from different groups disagree in human-like ways (inter-group disagreement), (ii) whether they become more sensitive when content targets their own identity (in-group sensitivity), and (iii) whether they can accurately predict how another group would react (vicarious prediction). Our results show that no model consistently captures all three dimensions, and performance is highly model-dependent and does not emerge reliably from minimal identity prompts alone. However, vicarious prompting with Llama 3.1 yields the highest cross-group agreement in most demographic axes and provides the closest overall approximation to human disagreement patterns, indicating that this configuration may provide a more reliable setting for automatic annotation aligned with human judgements.
Online hate speech is associated with harms ranging from deteriorating mental health to violence, yet how consistently platforms moderate hate, and whether enforcement is feasible at scale, remain poorly understood. We audit hate speech moderation on Twitter (now X) using 540,000 tweets annotated by trained native speakers, representative of a full day on the platform. Five months after posting, 80% of hateful tweets, including violent ones, remained online. Removal was only marginally more likely than for non-hateful tweets, far below scams or adult content, and insensitive to severity and reach. Automated detection could not reliably classify hate but ranked it highly, enabling human triage. Simulating this workflow, current staffing curbed little exposure, yet substantial reductions proved financially feasible, far below applicable regulatory fines. Persistent hate reflects resource allocation, not technical limits.