The Meme Is the Message: Generative Memesis and AI Visuals in the 2024 USA Presidential Elections 文章

arXiv:2411.00934v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual content on social media has become increasingly influential in shaping political discourse and civic engagement, but it also limits participation due to the increased cost of multimedia production. In tandem, the growth of generative AI provides novel ways for citizens to participate in politics by lowering these costs. Drawing on a dataset of 239,526 Instagram images, we analyze the effects of synthetic images during the 2024 United States presidential election, using a multimodal workflow combining computer vision, large language models, and facial affect analysis. Results show that meme format is a stronger predictor of engagement than AI-generated content alone. However, AI-generated memes yield a significant interaction effect, suggesting synergistic increases in engagement when synthetic imagery is integrated with memes through human curation. We also characterize how users curate images.