Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes

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Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes Dimitar Dimitrov1, Bishr Bin Ali2, Shaden Shaar3, Firoj Alam3, Fabrizio Silvestri4, Hamed Firooz5, Preslav Nakov3, Giovanni Da San Martino6 [email protected]; [email protected]; 3{sshaar, fialam, pnakov}@hbku.edu.qa; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Motivation ● Propaganda is a communication tool, which is deliberately designed to influence the opinions and the actions of other people in order to achieve a predetermined goal. ● Why Memes? ○ easy to understand ○ can easily spread 2 Propaganda Techniques ● We propose 22 propaganda techniques[1] Emotional appeals Logical fallacies 3 [1] We extend the list of 18 techniques of Da San Martino et al, “Fine-Grained Analysis of Propaganda in News Article”, EMNLP 2019 Propaganda Techniques Glittering generalities (mainly text contribution) 4 Propaganda Techniques Still Waiting… For peer reviewed evidence of eating GMO foods harming human health No propaganda technique 5 Propaganda Techniques Exaggeration (multimodal analysis needed) 6 The Task Multiclass-multilabel task Given a meme, find ALL the propaganda techniques used in it, BOTH in the text and in the image { "labels": [ "Reductio ad hitlerum", "Smears", "Loaded Language", "Name calling/Labeling" ], "text": "I HATE TRUMP\n\n MOST TERRORIST DO", "image": "y.png" } 7 Corpus Creation ● Data collection: a. English memes from Facebook public groups b. three months, 26 groups, 950 memes ● Annotations focused on: a. text only (20 techniques) b. the whole meme (20 + 2 techniques) 8 How often the technique requires to look at the image 1. Thought-terminating clichè 7. Causal Oversimplification 13. Red Herring 19. Smears 2. Bandwagon 8. Repetition 14. Flag-waving 20. Glittering Generalities 3. Loaded Language 9. Whataboutism 15. Appeal to authority 21. Transfer 4. Black-and-white Fallacy 10. Exaggeration/Minimisation 16. Appeal to fear/prejudice 22. Appeal to (strong) emotions 5. Slogans 11. Doubt 17. Straw man 6. Name Calling/Labeling 12. Obfuscation, Intentional Vagueness, Confusion 18. Reductio ad hitlerum 9 Experiments Baselines Unimodal Random Majority fastText BERT ResNet152 Multimodal {Early, Mid, Late} fusion Joint fastText + ResNet BERT + ResNet MMBT ViLBERT VisualBERT 10 Results 11 Conclusion and Future Work ● Studied propaganda in memes ● Released a corpus of 950 memes ● Experimented with a number of multi-modal methods ● Results show that a multimodal analysis is needed ● SemEval-2021 Task 6: Detection of Persuasive Techniques in Texts and Images ○ https://github.com/di-dimitrov/SEMEVAL-2021-task6-corpus 12 Conclusion and Future Work ● Future work includes: ○ extend the dataset in size, including other languages ○ develop multimodal models, tailored to fine-grained propaganda detection ○ understanding of the semantics of the meme and the relation between different modalities 13.

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