Abstract
Large language models increasingly evaluate, route, and moderate news, so a model's judgment of a headline has become a gatekeeping decision. We ask whether that judgment follows the fact being reported or the way the fact is framed. We combine an ecological audit of 63,926 Chinese news headlines with a controlled experiment. The experiment covers 30 real events, 30 synthetic events, and 29 natural headline pairs, tested on four Chinese models. Changing only the headline frame shifted both perceived misleadingness and event severity, and the direction and ordering of the shifts were the same for DeepSeek, MiMo, Dots, and LongCat. Emotionally intensified headlines raised severity ratings by 0.65 to 0.88 points, whereas positively reframed headlines lowered them by 0.34 to 0.52 points. Supplying the article body reduced this severity bias by 54 to 80 percent, and all four reductions were significant at p < .01. A small human reference study showed the same direction of effect. Headline-only LLM evaluation therefore carries a measurable robustness gap, and framing sensitivity belongs among the reliability properties that deployment and governance check.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13531
