ArMeme: Propagandistic Content in Arabic Memes
This addresses the problem of identifying misleading multimodal content in a medium-resource language for stakeholders like social media platforms and policymakers, though it is incremental as it extends existing efforts from resource-rich languages.
The study tackled the lack of resources for detecting propagandistic content in Arabic memes by creating a manually annotated dataset of ~6K Arabic memes, providing the first such resource for Arabic multimodal research.
With the rise of digital communication, memes have become a significant medium for cultural and political expression that is often used to mislead audiences. Identification of such misleading and persuasive multimodal content has become more important among various stakeholders, including social media platforms, policymakers, and the broader society as they often cause harm to individuals, organizations, and/or society. While there has been effort to develop AI-based automatic systems for resource-rich languages (e.g., English), it is relatively little to none for medium to low resource languages. In this study, we focused on developing an Arabic memes dataset with manual annotations of propagandistic content. We annotated ~6K Arabic memes collected from various social media platforms, which is a first resource for Arabic multimodal research. We provide a comprehensive analysis aiming to develop computational tools for their detection. We will make them publicly available for the community.