Investigating Controversy Framing across Topics on Social Media

Maxwell Weinzierl, Sanda M. Harabagiu


Abstract
Controversial discourse is abundant on social media. Understanding how controversial problems are framed in online discourse is crucial for gaining insights into public opinion formation and for addressing misinformation and polarization. This paper presents a novel method for discovering and articulating framing of controversial problems, enabling the investigation of how controversy is framed across several diverse topics. The promising results, made possible by recent advances in Large Language Models, indicate that discovering framings across topics is feasible. The discovered frames offer valuable insights into how and why controversial problems are discussed on social media.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.359
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6795–6814
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.359/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maxwell Weinzierl and Sanda M. Harabagiu. 2025. Investigating Controversy Framing across Topics on Social Media. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 6795–6814, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Controversy Framing across Topics on Social Media (Weinzierl & Harabagiu, Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.359.pdf
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