Against Political Polarization: A Unified Framework for Tracing Evolving Political Ideologies on Social Media

arXiv:2608.17987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid growth of social media has greatly influenced political discourse, highlighting the need to understand individual political ideologies and their temporal dynamics. This task faces challenges such as data scarcity, abundant non-political content, costly and bias-prone manual annotation, and difficulty in modeling future ideological inclinations. To address these issues, we propose TSN4PI, a unified framework for tracking the evolution of political ideologies on social media. It includes two core modules. The PIDN uses large language models with style transfer and unsupervised domain adaptation to enable robust ideology detection and filter irrelevant content from noisy, cross-domain data. The PIPN employs temporal graph neural networks to predict future ideological shifts, enabling comprehensive analysis of ideology presence, intensity, and evolution. We release two large-scale datasets for noncommercial research use to facilitate further work. Extensive case studies on multiple platforms (X and Truth Social) validate the effectiveness of TSN4PI and provide empirical insights into political polarization and the evolution of online ideologies. Our findings offer a nuanced perspective, advancing both methodological development and empirical understanding in this field.

Related

• Cyberbullying Governance on Social Media: A Unified Framework from Content Identification to Intervention
• Mapping how LLMs debate societal issues when shadowing human personality traits, sociodemographics and social media behavior
• LLM Agents Predict Social Media Reactions but Do Not Outperform Text Classifiers: Benchmarking Simulation Accuracy Using 120K+ Personas of 1511 Humans

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-19