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Author
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Timo Spinde, Fei Wu, Wolfgang Gaissmaier, Gianluca Demartini, Isao Echizen, Helge Giese
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Year
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November 2025
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Publisher
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Information Processing and Management
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Abstract
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Marking biased texts effectively increases media bias awareness, but its sustainability across new topics and unmarked news remains unclear, and the role of AI-generated bias labels is untested. This study examines how news consumers learn to perceive media bias from human- and AIgenerated labels and identify biased language through highlighting, neutral rephrasing, and political orientation cues. We conducted two experiments with a teaching phase exposing them to various bias-labeling conditions and a testing phase evaluating their ability to classify biased sentences and detect biased text in unlabeled news on new topics.
We find that, compared to the control group, both human- and AI-generated sentential bias labels significantly improve bias classification (p < .001), though human labels are more effective (d = 0.42 vs. d = 0.23). Additionally, among all teaching interventions, participants best detectbiased sentences when taught with biased sentence or phrase labels (p < .001), while politicized phrase labels reduce accuracy. The effectiveness of different media literacy interventions remains independent of political ideology, but conservative participants are generally less accurate (p =.011), suggesting an interaction between political inclinations and bias detection. Our research provides a novel experimental framework into assessing the generalizability of media bias awareness and offer practical implications for designing bias indicators in newsreading platforms and media literacy curricula.
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Language
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English