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PoliMeme: Exploring Offensive Meme Propagation in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Grover, Pratham Gohil, Vijayrajsinh Goel, Bhavya Veeramani, Hariram Shah, Siddhant Bikram Jain, Sandesh Rajendra Thapa, Surendrabikram Razzak, Imran Naseem, Usman
Grover, Pratham
Gohil, Vijayrajsinh
Goel, Bhavya
Veeramani, Hariram
Shah, Siddhant Bikram
Jain, Sandesh Rajendra
Thapa, Surendrabikram
Razzak, Imran
Naseem, Usman
Supervisor
Department
Computational Biology
Embargo End Date
Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
License
Language
English
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Research Projects
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Abstract
Social media platforms have become powerful tools for communication, often harnessing memes to convey ideas, opinions, and at times misinformation. In the midst of global polarized issues, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, memes can rapidly spread offensive content and speech, influencing public perception. We introduce PoliMeme, a novel multimodal dataset encompassing text-embedded memes relevant to the Israel-Palestine conflict, meticulously annotated for sentiment analysis (positive, negative, neutral) and offensive content detection, further subdivided into direction of offense (directed vs. undirected) and targeted entities (individuals, organizations, communities). We benchmark several state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal models to evaluate their performance in classifying these memes. Our findings underscore the necessity of multimodal methods to fully capture the subtle interplay between textual cues and visual context. We further highlight challenges unique to politically charged and culturally sensitive content, emphasizing the importance of precise annotation and robust processing strategies. With the PoliMeme dataset and accompanying analysis, we present a timely contribution to advance the understanding of how offensive speech and sentiment are propagated through text-embedded memes, while also contributing to safer digital spaces by informing content moderation practices. The dataset is available at https://github.com/PrathamLearnsToCode/PoliMeme. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
Citation
P. Grover et al., “PoliMeme: Exploring Offensive Meme Propagation in the Israel-Palestine Conflict,” pp. 1969–1978, May 2025, doi: 10.1145/3701716.3718387
Source
WWW Companion 2025 - Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025
Conference
34th ACM Web Conference, WWW Companion 2025
Keywords
Content Analysis, Multimodality, Text-embedded Images
Subjects
Source
34th ACM Web Conference, WWW Companion 2025
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery