Trustify

Introduction

This guide looks into how fake news websites and viral content like memes work in terms of political agenda-setting, processes, and culture. The focus is on what memes can say about political events, actors, and topical issues, particularly as illustrated by the 2016 US presidential election. Memetic activity refers to the various ways people interact with memes on the internet, such as sharing, copying, and changing them. The guide aims to find and map Facebook meme spaces, explore how users use memetic activity to interact with political events, and offer methods for examining meme content.

How can meme spaces on Facebook be traced? 

Tracing Meme Spaces on Facebook The study aims to network connections around a Facebook page by tracing “likes” from the page to other pages. It would create a directed network file with nodes for pages and edges for likes with a Facebook crawler by extracting the “likes” network. A network analysis tool like Gephi is used to analyze the content and structure of the network. The configuration of the network graph can be examined quantitatively using measures like indegree, outdegree, and betweenness centrality. The study also examines the prevalence of pro-Trump memes on Facebook, showing that even politically neutral pages have connections to pages spreading pro-Trump memes and nationalism and populism.

How do memes frame political and media events?

It includes 46 pages selected from a corpus based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria: engagement counts and thematic clusters. The timeframe during which memes are sourced is three days. Images are then extracted and downloaded for each URL, with visual juxtaposition to compare meme reactions across events. The process can also be explored to compare reactions to a single event across Facebook pages. An example is a visualization showing how pro-Trump pages reference Bill Clinton’s past sexual harassment victims.

HOW MAY THE CONTENT OF MEMES BE STUDIED?

The recipe demonstrates methods for detecting content in memes and analyzing text and visual content. It uses Breitbart and God Emperor Trump, Facebook sites with pro-Trump memes, as examples. These photos display memetic characteristics like virality, user-driven remixing, imitation, and intertextuality, even if they don’t fit traditional meme formats. Breitbart is chosen for the impact that it has had in developing alt-right culture, and the page of His God Emperor Trump has over 245,000 likes. Only page administrators can post photos on Breitbart, while users can submit their products for posting in God Emperor Trump.

To create a corpus of images and associated metadata related to a particular Facebook page, utilize all pictures uploaded onto this page, or limit it to a specified period of interest.

Extract metadata using the Facebook API or data extraction tools like Netvizz. Download photos using browser extensions like Tab Save or DownThemAll! Use optical character recognition (OCR) software like Google’s Vision API to extract text from each image.

Breitbart’s Facebook page features a network of nouns and adjectives in 2016, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the core. Examine the visual styles of memes using image analysis programs like Google Vision and CorText. Visual styles per cluster can be inspected visually, and the process can be repeated with other pages to compare styles. It is possible to identify unique visual styles in a meme repository, such as memes based on screenshots, cartoons, and comics like Pepe the Frog.