Visual Mis- and Disinformation by Political Influencers on Facebook

• In Event: Innovations in Misinformation Research and Remedies

Abstract

As Carmi and colleagues (2022) put it, this is the “age of disinformation”. The concepts of misinformation and disinformation are close in meaning, but there is one significant difference between them: the intention. As the literature described, both concepts denote the spread of inaccurate, false information, but misinformation might be unintentional, while disinformation refers to deliberate, strategic considerations (Hameleers et al., 2020; Weikmann & Lecheler, 2022). Nevertheless, both mis- and disinformation lead to negative consequences for democracy: citizens form political opinions and judgments based on incorrect information, which leads to a deterioration in the quality of democracy.

Although verbal dis- and misinformation have started to be emerging research topics in political communication, this is not true for visuals (Weikmann & Lecheler, 2022). However, compared to verbal communication, visual information is processed faster (Grabe & Bucy, 2009), and is easier to recall (Graber, 1996), and this is true in the case of visual mis- and disinformation as well. Images that are used to spread incorrect information seem to be more credible (Messaris & Abraham, 2001), persuasive, and more likely to be shared (Hameleers et al., 2020). Consequently, false information conveyed visually can have an even stronger effect than textual mis- and disinformation.

In the fourth age of political communication (Blumler, 2016), when the internet and social media offer platforms for political actors and citizens to directly communicate without the interference of media and journalists, mis- and disinformation can also be communicated without filters and gatekeepers (Engesser et al., 2017). Further, this information can be spread not only by the traditional political communication actors – political actors, media, and citizens – but also by newcomers, such as political influencers, who are relatively new actors in the political public sphere but can attract a lot of attention in politics (Bause, 2021). These actors are usually well-known in social media as self-created personal brands, who can participate in political campaigns as independent actors (Goodwin et al., 2023). However, another form of political influencers’ participation is the astroturfing activity: perceived as independent expressions, which in fact are coordinated and controlled by political actors (Kovic et al., 2018).

The 2022 Hungarian national elections introduced a unique example of political influencers: pro-government astroturf political influencers were trained by a formally independent, informally pro-government agency – Megafon – to flood Facebook with posts and ads to help Fidesz win the election (Bene & Juhász, 2024).

While the small body of existing literature on visual mis-and disinformation has mainly focused on individual users, public Facebook pages are still neglected (Yang et al., 2023), which is especially true for political influencers’ pages. To contribute to this emerging research field of political communication, the present project investigates visual mis- and disinformation by astroturf political influencers on Facebook during the 2022 Hungarian national election campaign. The main research questions are whether visual mis- and disinformation was present, and if so, what kinds of messages are spread this way.

To answer the research questions, Facebook posts with visual elements will be analyzed by manual content analysis, which differentiates between the following main mis- and disinformation forms based on Hameleers and colleagues’ (2020) work: (1) pairing real visuals with misleading texts (decontextualization); (2) cropping or decontextualizing visuals to make certain aspects of issues more salient in a goal-directed way (reframing); (3) manipulating visuals to present a different reality (visual doctoring); (4) fabricating content by pairing manipulated images with manipulated text (multimodal doctoring).

Author

• Xénia Farkas, HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences