Analyzing Image-based Political Propaganda in Referendum Campaigns: From Elements to Strategies

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 2,000 Facebook images from Taiwanese referendum campaigns to understand visual propaganda elements and strategies, revealing common coloring tactics and organization-specific content variations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of image-based political propaganda in referendum campaigns, focusing on visual elements and strategic use of colors.

Findings

Coloring strategies are similar across parties, using representative and opponent colors.

Propaganda elements vary between political organizations.

Images serve to consolidate support and attack opponents.

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of social network services, paradigm-shifting has occurred in political communication. Politicians, candidates, and political organizations establish their fan pages to interact with online citizens. Initially, they publish text-only content on sites; then, they create multimedia content such as photos, images, and videos to approach more people. This paper takes a first look at image-based political propaganda during a national referendum in Taiwan. Unlike elections, a referendum is a vote on policies. We investigated more than 2,000 images posted on Facebook by the two major parties to understand the elements of images and the strategies of political organizations. In addition, we studied the data collection's textual content, objects, and colors. The results suggest the aspects of propaganda materials vary with different political organizations. However, the coloring strategies are similar, using representative colors for consolidation and the opponent's colors for attacks.