Memes, Misinformation, and Political Meaning

Lynch, Michael P.

doi:10.1111/sjp.12456

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…As potential vectors for misinformation [21] and political propaganda [25], but also as a novel digital medium for expressing complex and relatable ideas [5], IMs have been of interest to cognitive linguistics [5], psychology [13], and neuroscience [23]. Recent computer science research on IMs focuses on analyzing their spread (i.e., "virality") [22,31,18] or their relation to hate speech in fringe communities [14,15,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

IMKG: The Internet Meme Knowledge Graph

Tommasini,

Ilievski,

Wijesiriwardene

2023

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Internet Memes (IMs) are creative media that combine text and vision modalities that people use to describe their situation by reusing an existing, familiar situation. Prior work on IMs has focused on analyzing their spread over time or high-level classification tasks like hate speech detection, while a principled analysis of their stratified semantics is missing. Hypothesizing that Semantic Web technologies are appropriate to help us bridge this gap, we build the first Internet Meme Knowledge Graph (IMKG): an explicit representation with 2 million edges that capture the semantics encoded in the text, vision, and metadata of thousands of media frames and their adaptations as memes. IMKG is designed to fulfil seven requirements derived from the inherent characteristics of IMs. IMKG is based on a comprehensive semantic model, it is populated with data from representative IM sources, and enriched with entities extracted from text and vision connected through background knowledge from Wikidata. IMKG integrates its knowledge both in RDF and as a labelled property graph. We provide insights into the structure of IMKG, analyze its central concepts, and measure the effect of knowledge enrichment from different information modalities. We demonstrate its ability to support novel use cases, like querying for IMs that are based on films, and we provide insights into the signal captured by the structure and the content of its nodes. As a novel publicly available resource, IMKG opens the possibility for further work to study the semantics of IMs, develop novel reasoning tasks, and improve its quality.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

IMKG: The Internet Meme Knowledge Graph

Tommasini,

Ilievski,

Wijesiriwardene

2023

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Controlling what is taught, what appears in textbooks, and who can teach are on trend to develop an authoritarian society that believes false narratives while maintaining patriotism for their country. Interestingly, the critiques of critical race theory, social justice, and all forms of equity and diversity pedagogical tools are based on misinformation and the misrepresentation by media, primarily conservative, outlets (Benson, 2022; Lynch, 2022). As of June 2023, 30 bills across 23 states have been introduced targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at public colleges and universities (Bryant & Appleby, 2023).…”

Section: More Than Just a Fight Against Social Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Status Quo or Innovation? Transforming Teacher Education in Hostile Times

Brown

2024

Educational Policy

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Teacher education is at a critical crossroads as colleges and schools of education contend with decreased student enrollment, legislative strategizing to limit what is taught, and general pushback regarding what teachers should learn about teaching and their students. As such, the field of teacher education must examine how to collectively rebuff the current movement by policy makers and elected officials who have formalized their desire to maintain the status quo in education. They continue to lobby against social justice in education, critical race theory, multicultural perspectives in teaching, and culturally responsive and relevant pedagogical approaches to classroom instruction, among others. This paper examines the current moment in educational history and highlights opportunities that may transform teacher education policy to become more justice centered.

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“…For example, perhaps the prevalence of political misinformation also explains some public political ignorance. SeeBenkler, Faris, and Roberts (2018),Brown (2018), O'Connor and Weatherall (2019),Fritts and Cabrera (2022),Lynch (2022), andGibbons (2023a;2023b) for relevant discussion.…”

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confidence: 99%

Political ignorance is both rational and radical

Gibbons

2023

Synthese

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It is commonly held that political ignorance is rational, a response to the high costs and low benefits of acquiring political information. But many recent critics of the claim that political ignorance is rational instead urge that it is a simple consequence of agents not concerning themselves with the acquisition of political information whatsoever. According to such critics, political ignorance is inadvertent radical ignorance rather than a rational response to the incentives faced by agents in democracies. And since political ignorance is not a response to incentives, these critics urge, it cannot be ameliorated by incentivizing the acquisition of political information. This paper has two goals. First, I show that these seemingly competing accounts of political ignorance are in fact complementary, together explaining much political ignorance. Indeed, there is a sense in which political ignorance can be both rational and radical at the same time. Second, I more closely examine the relationship between incentives, kinds of political ignorance, and the acquisition of political information. On the one hand, from the fact that political ignorance is rational it does not follow that it can be overcome by incentivizing the acquisition of information.On the other hand, from the fact that political ignorance is radical it does not follow that it cannot be overcome by incentivizing the acquisition of information. Lastly, the complexity of the information in question is more relevant to determining whether ignorance can be overcome than whether such ignorance is rational or radical.

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Memes, Misinformation, and Political Meaning

Cited by 5 publications

References 32 publications

IMKG: The Internet Meme Knowledge Graph

IMKG: The Internet Meme Knowledge Graph

Status Quo or Innovation? Transforming Teacher Education in Hostile Times

Political ignorance is both rational and radical

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