Meysam Alizadeh

Web-Browsing LLMs Can Access Social Media Profiles and Infer User Demographics Large language models (LLMs) have traditionally relied on static training data, limiting their knowledge to fixed snapshots. Recent advancements, however, have equipped LLMs with web browsing capabili...

This work was a great collaboration with @fgilardi.bsky.social, Zeynab Samei, and @mmosleh.bsky.social

Read the full preprint here:
🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2507.12372

Adversarial Search Engine Optimization for Large Language Models Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications where the model selects from competing third-party content, such as in LLM-powered search engines or chatbot plugins. In this paper, ...

Another risk: web-browsing LLMs are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. As shown in arxiv.org/abs/2406.18382, hidden prompts in webpages can hijack model behavior—posing serious threats to otherwise beneficial applications.

Our findings show major privacy risks: web-browsing LLMs can profile social media users at scale—opening the door to misuse by malicious actors. Under GDPR, such automated profiling requires transparency, consent, and the right to opt out.

Our second dataset came from a prior survey study (N=1,384) with self-reported usernames and demographics from an international sample, mostly from US and UK.
LLMs achieved higher accuracy than with the synthetic dataset—and showed no gender or political bias.

Our first dataset included 48 synthetic X accounts, generated with GPT4o (tweets, profiles, images).
Even for the 19 accounts that were later suspended, LLMs could still infer age and gender.
We also observed gender and political biases—especially against low-activity accounts.

We tested six prompting strategies to infer age, gender, political orientation, and socioeconomic status—using only usernames or X (Twitter) profile links.
Surprisingly, in most cases, usernames outperformed full profile links.

🚨 New preprint alert:

We show that web-browsing GPT and LLaMA models can infer social media user demographics with reasonable accuracy—using only usernames.

This opens new possibilities for social media research in the post-API era but raises important privacy concerns.

✨ New LLM paper ✨

> Open-source LLMs perform well in text annotation tasks
> Fine-tuned open-source LLMs outperform zero-shot GPT-4
> Fine-tuning beats few-shot training with modest amount of annotated data

w/ @malizadeh.bsky.social @maelkubli.bsky.social et al.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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How Negative Media Coverage Impacts Platform Governance: Evidence from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube Social media companies wield considerable power over what people can say and do online, with consequences for freedom of expression and participation in digital culture. Yet we still know little ab...

"We find that sustained negative coverage significantly predicts changes to platforms’ user policies, highlighting the role of public pressure in shaping the governance of online platforms."

by @emmahoes.bsky.social @klueserthan.bsky.social @maelkubli.bsky.social @malizadeh.bsky.social et al.

FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation Most large language models (LLMs) are trained once and never updated; thus, they lack the ability to dynamically adapt to our ever-changing world. In this work, we perform a detailed study of the...

"we present FreshPrompt, a simple few-shot prompting method that substantially boosts the performance of an LLM on FreshQA by incorporating relevant and up-to-date information retrieved from a search engine into the prompt."

via @malizadeh.bsky.social

26./27.10: 2023 Digital Democracy Workshop The Digital Democracy Workshop is co-organized by the Democracy Community of the Digital Society Initiative and the Digital Democracy Lab at the University of Zurich. It aims to facilitate exchange…

Check out the program of the 2023 Digital Democracy Workshop, Oct 26-27, University of Zurich

Keynote by Atoosa Kasirzadeh: "Can we reconcile the governmental use of online targeting with democracy?"

Free attendance, registration required

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