Hope vs. Hate: Understanding User Interactions with LGBTQ+ News Content in Mainstream US News Media through the Lens of Hope Speech

This paper makes three contributions. First, via a substantial corpus of 1,419,047 comments posted on 3,161 YouTube news videos of major US cable news outlets, we analyze how users engage with LGBTQ+ news content. Our analyses focus both on positive and negative content. In particular, we construct a fine-grained hope speech classifier that detects positive (hope speech), negative, neutral, and irrelevant content. Second, in consultation with a public health expert specializing on LGBTQ+ health, we conduct an annotation study with a balanced and diverse political representation and release a dataset of 3,750 instances with fine-grained labels and detailed annotator demographic information. Finally, beyond providing a vital resource for the LGBTQ+ community, our annotation study and subsequent in-the-wild assessments reveal (1) strong association between rater political beliefs and how they rate content relevant to a marginalized community; (2) models trained on individual political beliefs exhibit considerable in-the-wild disagreement; and (3) zero-shot large language models (LLMs) align more with liberal raters.

@article{pofcher2025_2502.09004,
  title={ Hope vs. Hate: Understanding User Interactions with LGBTQ+ News Content in Mainstream US News Media through the Lens of Hope Speech },
  author={ Jonathan Pofcher and Christopher M. Homan and Randall Sell and Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09004},
  year={ 2025 }
}