Reducing Political Manipulation with Consistency Training
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22771v2
- Date: Thu, 28 May 2026 14:36:56 GMT
- Title: Reducing Political Manipulation with Consistency Training
- Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic political bias across a variety of sensitive contexts.<n>We refer to this phenomenon as covert political bias and identify 7 categories of techniques through which it operates.
- Score: 47.17237436864747
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic political bias across a variety of sensitive contexts. We find that LLMs handle counterpart topics from opposing political sides asymmetrically. We refer to this phenomenon as covert political bias and identify 7 categories of techniques through which it operates. We propose two metrics for covert bias: Sentiment Consistency measures symmetry in rhetoric and framing across paired political prompts; Helpfulness Consistency measures symmetric depth and engagement. To reduce both types of covert bias, we introduce Political Consistency Training (PCT), an RL training method with two complementary paradigms: Sentiment Consistency Training and Helpfulness Consistency Training. We show that PCT preserves overall helpfulness, substantially reduces covert political bias, and generalizes to held-out benchmarks. We release our work at https://political-manipulation.ai
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