{"ID":2873056,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07768","arxiv_id":"2509.07768","title":"Are LLMs Enough for Hyperpartisan, Fake, Polarized and Harmful Content Detection? Evaluating In-Context Learning vs. Fine-Tuning","abstract":"The spread of fake news, polarizing, politically biased, and harmful content on online platforms has been a serious concern. With large language models becoming a promising approach, however, no study has properly benchmarked their performance across different models, usage methods, and languages. This study presents a comprehensive overview of different Large Language Models adaptation paradigms for the detection of hyperpartisan and fake news, harmful tweets, and political bias. Our experiments spanned 10 datasets and 5 different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Bulgarian), covering both binary and multiclass classification scenarios. We tested different strategies ranging from parameter efficient Fine-Tuning of language models to a variety of different In-Context Learning strategies and prompts. These included zero-shot prompts, codebooks, few-shot (with both randomly-selected and diversely-selected examples using Determinantal Point Processes), and Chain-of-Thought. We discovered that In-Context Learning often underperforms when compared to Fine-Tuning a model. This main finding highlights the importance of Fine-Tuning even smaller models on task-specific settings even when compared to the largest models evaluated in an In-Context Learning setup - in our case LlaMA3.1-8b-Instruct, Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct.","short_abstract":"The spread of fake news, polarizing, politically biased, and harmful content on online platforms has been a serious concern. With large language models becoming a promising approach, however, no study has properly benchmarked their performance across different models, usage methods, and languages. This study presents a...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07768","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07768v1","authors":"[\"Michele Joshua Maggini\",\"Dhia Merzougui\",\"Rabiraj Bandyopadhyay\",\"Gaël Dias\",\"Fabrice Maurel\",\"Pablo Gamallo\"]","published":"2025-09-09T14:01:15Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}