Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes

Abstract

Propaganda can be defined as a form of communication that aims to influence the opinions or the actions of people towards a specific goal; this is achieved by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Propaganda, in the form we know it today, can be dated back to the beginning of the 17th century. However, it is with the advent of the Internet and the social media that it has started to spread on a much larger scale than before, thus becoming major societal and political issue. Nowadays, a large fraction of propaganda in social media is multimodal, mixing textual with visual content. With this in mind, here we propose a new multi-label multimodal task: detecting the type of propaganda techniques used in memes. We further create and release a new corpus of 950 memes, carefully annotated with 22 propaganda techniques, which can appear in the text, in the image, or in both. Our analysis of the corpus shows that understanding both modalities together is essential for detecting these techniques. This is further confirmed in our experiments with several state-of-the-art multimodal models.

A Multi-Modal Dataset for Hate Speech Detection on Social Media: Case-study of Russia-Ukraine Conflict

“…For their study, they used the famous dataset from Hateful Memes Challenge (Kiela et al, 2020). Similarly, Dimitrov et al (2021) presented a method to identify propaganda techniques in memes by leveraging the multi-modal information and classifying them into 22 propaganda techniques.…”

“…During the expression of such opinions and ideas, there can be mixed emotions. Some opinions lean towards supporting the people on the ground who are suffering in such political events whereas some opinions are about blaming each other, name-calling, exaggera-tion of information, etc (Dimitrov et al, 2021). In political situations pertaining to invasion, the situation becomes even worse.…”

Cornered Islamic Society: A Critical Discourse Analysis on Islamophobic Memes

“…Propagandists manipulated those discourses and presented them at public events such as theatres and festivals. In the modern era, it has evolved into systemic computational propaganda using media and popular memes (Wooley & Howard, 2018;Martino et al, 2020;Dimitrov et al, 2021). Those media contain unique illustrations that are rich in meaning.…”

Between the Star Boy and the City Boy: Humour, Sarcasm and Rhetoric-Induced (De)Marketing in a Nigerian Presidential Primary Election

“…Coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, memes are 'an integral part of the netizen vernacular' (Shifman, 2013:362) used to imitate a phenomenon that has one form of social/cultural information or the other when communicated implicitly or explicitly to others (Shifman, 2013). In fact, the internet has made it easier for political actors to use the multimodal feature of memes (they can combine visuals with texts) for political propaganda (Dimitrov et al, 2021), strengthening and criticising political ideologies (Martínez-Rolán & Piñeiro-Otero, 2016;Al Zidjaly, 2017). Netizens also use Internet memes for political participation, expression and evaluation of morals (Ross & Rivers, 2017Seiffert-Brockmann, Diehl & Dobusch, 2017, symbolic representation of an ideology (DeCook, 2018) and public discourse provocation (Howley, 2016), among others.…”