Whitewashing Hate, Smearing Harmless Content: Annotator-Style Rebuttal Attacks on LLM-Based Moderation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for hate speech moderation, often within human--AI workflows in which reviewers provide feedback before a final decision. Such feedback introduces two manipulation directions: whitewashing hateful content as normal and smearing normal content as hateful. This study examines the susceptibility of initially correct model judgments to annotator-style rebuttals and analyzes whether attack effectiveness differs across manipulation directions. We introduce a rejudge protocol that extends direct contradiction with decision-boundary perturbations and adversarial rationales. Experiments with multiple LLMs on two hate speech datasets show that annotator-style rebuttals substantially degrade moderation performance, with stronger effects in multi-turn settings. The results further reveal stable, model-specific asymmetries between whitewashing and smearing across attack configurations, indicating distinct directional vulnerability patterns. Explicit reasoning prompts and defensive instructions reduce these effects but do not eliminate them. These findings highlight the need for direction-aware safeguards and dedicated feedback-robustness evaluation in human--AI moderation workflows.