Towards Multimodal Campaign Detection: Including Image Information in Stream Clustering to Detect Social Media Campaigns

Stampe, Lucas; Pohl, Janina; Grimme, Christian


Abstract

This work explores the potential to include visual informa- tion from images in social media campaign recognition. The diverse con- tent shared on social media platforms, including text, photos, videos, and links, necessitates a multimodal analysis approach. With the emer- gence of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an opportunity to convert image content into textual descriptions, enabling the incorpo- ration of previously text-based methods into a multimodal analysis. We evaluate this approach by conducting a parameter study to assess the resulting differences in image captions and a case study to examine the contribution of textualized image information to campaign recognition. The results indicate that, using image captions separate from or along- side tweet texts, connections between campaigns can be identified, and new campaigns detected.

Keywords
Social Media; Multimodality; Campaign Detection; Image to Text



Publication type
Research article in proceedings (conference)

Peer reviewed
Yes

Publication status
Published

Year
2023

Conference
5th Multidisciplinary International Symposium (MISDOOM 2023)

Venue
Amsterdam

Volume
5

Book title
Disinformation in Open Online Media

Editor
Ceolin, Davide; Caselli, Tommaso; Tulin, Marina

Start page
144

End page
159

Volume
14397

Title of series
Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Publisher
Springer

Place
Amsterdam

Language
English

ISBN
978-3-031-47895-6

DOI