What is it about?
Memes are those funny or clever pictures or videos you often see on the Internet. People use them to share their thoughts and feelings about different topics. But some memes can spread hateful ideas too. In this research, we looked at how memes played a role in spreading hate during COVID-19. We collected over 4,000 COVID-19-related hateful memes and their responses on X over three years. Then, we studied how these memes affected people's feelings on Twitter using different methods. What we found was that these COVID-19-related hateful memes had a bigger negative impact on people compared to hateful text messages. And over time, people's feelings towards these memes became more negative.
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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Different from the popular discourse that focuses on textual data, such as tweets in the spread of online hate, our work performs a timely exploration of the role of memes during the period of COVID-19. Our findings show that hateful memes had a more negative effect on people than text-based tweets.
Perspectives
Writing this article was an eye-opening moment for me. While I had worked extensively on hateful text and its negative impact, I had not explored how memes affected people, especially during stressful situations, such as the pandemic. This paper not only shows the importance of studying hateful memes but also informs social media moderators to especially monitor memes in times of crisis.
Nishant Vishwamitra
University of Texas at San Antonio
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Understanding and Analyzing COVID-19-related Online Hate Propagation Through Hateful Memes Shared on Twitter, November 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3625007.3630111.
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