Whitewashing Hate, Smearing Harmless Content: Annotator-Style Rebuttal Attacks on LLM-Based Moderation — Paper

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for hate speech moderation, often within human--AI workflows in which reviewers provide feedback before a final decision. Such feedback introduces two manipulation directions: whitewashing hateful content as normal and smearing normal content as hateful. This study examines the susceptibility of initially correct model judgments to annotator-style rebuttals and analyzes whether attack effectiveness differs across manipulation directions. We introduce a rejudge protocol that extends direct contradiction with decision-boundary perturbations and adversarial rationales. Experiments with multiple LLMs on two hate speech datasets show that annotator-style rebuttals substantially degrade moderation performance, with stronger effects in multi-turn settings. The results further reveal stable, model-specific asymmetries between whitewashing and smearing across attack configurations, indicating distinct directional vulnerability patterns. Explicit reasoning prompts and defensive instructions reduce these effects but do not eliminate them. These findings highlight the need for direction-aware safeguards and dedicated feedback-robustness evaluation in human--AI moderation workflows.

Authors 11

Junyu Lu, Kaiyuan Liu, Kaichun Wang, Jingyi Kang, Deyi Ji, Hailong Zhang, Lanyun Zhu, Qi Zhu, Bo Xu, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2608.22230
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2608.22230
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2608.22230
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 6 h agohigh

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9

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T19

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6 h ago

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None

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Authors: Junyu Lu, Kaiyuan Liu, Kaichun Wang

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Claim history for Authors
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
Junyu Lu, Kaiyuan Liu, Kaichun Wang, Jingyi Kang, Deyi Ji, Hailong Zhang, Lanyun Zhu, Qi Zhu, Bo Xu, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperWhitewashing Hate, Smearing Harmless Content: Annotator-Style Rebuttal Attacks on LLM-Based Moderation
New paper: Whitewashing Hate, Smearing Harmless Content: Annotator-Style Rebuttal Attacks on LLM-Based Moderation
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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL	feed	T1· Official	4 h ago	1

Tier 1 = official/primary, 2 = quality secondary, 3 = community, 4 = unverified. Every snapshot is archived; see all sources and the methodology.