SLURG: Investigating the Feasibility of Generating Synthetic Online Fallacious Discourse

Abstract: 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 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.