A Counterfactual Graph Approach to Oppositional Narrative Analysis

Abstract:Distinguishing legitimate critical speech from coordinated conspiracy narratives is a pressing challenge for the integrity of the online information ecosystem, yet prevailing approaches rely on labeled entity roles and rigid predefined schemas that fail to capture the diffuse and context-dependent nature of participation in such narratives. We propose a modular framework that extracts an entity-interaction graph directly from narratives and reasons over it for classification, without depending on annotated node-level labels. Our pipeline enumerates candidate entity spans from a domain-adapted BERT encoder and learns a bipartite graph structure, which is then classified with a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer. To make predictions interpretable, we cast the graph as a hypergraph and apply a counterfactual distillation procedure that estimates the Individual Treatment Effect of each node, pruning extraneous entities to recover a minimal predictive subgraph. On the standard PAN Oppositional Narratives benchmark, our model achieves a macro F1-score of 0.93 and an MCC of 0.84, reaching state-of-the-art performance with roughly one-third of the parameters of the next best system, while pruning the graphs by 75.2% on average without altering predictions. Our results demonstrate that graph-based representations coupled with counterfactual inference offer both strong predictive accuracy and transparency into the entities driving conspiratorial discourse.

14 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at the 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026). Workshop: Trustworthy AI for Good (AI4GOOD)

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2603.06135 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2603.06135v3 [cs.CL] for this version)