# SLURG: Investigating the Feasibility of Generating Synthetic Online Fallacious Discourse

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12466 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12466/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02517/) (2019)
- [Further Generalizations of the Jaccard Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09619/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13037/) (2024)
- [Robust and Explainable Identification of Logical Fallacies in Natural Language Arguments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07425/) (2022)
- [Towards Realistic Synthetic User-Generated Content: A Scaffolding Approach to Generating Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08379/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In our paper we explore the definition, and extrapolation of fallacies as they pertain to the automatic detection of manipulation on social media. In particular we explore how these logical fallacies might appear in the real world i.e internet forums. We discovered a prevalence of misinformation / misguided intention in discussion boards specifically centered around the Ukrainian Russian Conflict which serves to narrow the domain of our task. Although automatic fallacy detection has gained attention recently, most datasets use unregulated fallacy taxonomies or are limited to formal linguistic domains like political debates or news reports. Online discourse, however, often features non-standardized and diverse language not captured in these domains. We present Shady Linguistic Utterance Replication-Generation (SLURG) to address these limitations, exploring the feasibility of generating synthetic fallacious forum-style comments using large language models (LLMs), specifically DeepHermes-3-Mistral-24B. Our findings indicate that LLMs can replicate the syntactic patterns of real data} and that high-quality few-shot prompts enhance LLMs' ability to mimic the vocabulary diversity of online forums.