Detecting Propaganda Techniques in Memes

Home , Obfuscation, Reductio ad Hitlerum, Whataboutism

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