Exploiting the Right: Inferring Ideological Alignment in Online Influence Campaigns Using Shared Images

TL;DR

This paper investigates how shared images in disinformation campaigns reveal ideological alignments, finding that influence campaigns from Iran, Russia, China, and Venezuela tend to share conservative visual content, contrasting with their diverse textual content.

Contribution

It introduces a model for inferring ideological presentation from shared images, revealing consistent conservative visual bias across multiple disinformation campaigns.

Findings

Models recover expected ideological distributions of US politicians.

Influence campaigns from Iran, Russia, China, and Venezuela share conservative images.

Visual content shows ideological consistency despite textual diversity.

Abstract

This work advances investigations into the visual media shared by agents in disinformation campaigns by characterizing the images shared by accounts identified by Twitter as being part of such campaigns. Using images shared by US politicians' Twitter accounts as a baseline and training set, we build models for inferring the ideological presentation of accounts using the images they share. Results show that, while our models recover the expected bimodal ideological distribution of US politicians, we find that, on average, four separate influence campaigns -- attributed to Iran, Russia, China, and Venezuela -- all present conservative ideological presentations in the images they share. Given that prior work has shown Twitter accounts used by Russian disinformation agents are ideologically diverse in the text and news they share, these image-oriented findings provide new insights into potential axes of coordination and suggest these accounts may not present consistent ideological positions across modalities.