Detecting Propaganda in News Articles Using Large Language Models

The proliferation of media channels as a result of the information age has ushered in a new era of communication and access to information. However, this increased accessibility has also opened up new avenues for propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion. With the recent release of OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, users and the media are increasingly discovering and reporting on its range of novel capabilities. The most notable of these, such as answering technical questions, stem from its ability to perform advanced natural language processing and text generation. In this paper, we aim to assess the feasibility of using the underlying technology behind ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), to detect features of propaganda in news articles. The features we consider leverage the work of Martino et al., who define a list of 18 distinct propaganda techniques. For example, they outline the 'straw man' technique, which refers to the use of 'refuting an argument that was not presented' 1. Based on these techniques, we develop a refined prompt that is coupled with news articles from Russia Today (RT), a prominent state-controlled news network, and from the labelled SemEval-2020 Task 11 dataset 2. The prompt and article content are then sent to OpenAI’s gpt-3.5-turbo model to determine which propaganda techniques are present and to make a final judgement on whether the article is propaganda or not. We then qualitatively analyse a subset of the resulting output to determine whether LLMs can be used effectively in this way. With the results of the study, we aim to uncover whether such technologies show promise in detecting propaganda, and what sort of prompts lead to the most useful output. This has the potential to be useful for media consumers, for example, who could use our prompts to detect signs of propaganda in the articles they read.