https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00407-4
Regular Article
Analyzing image-based political propaganda in referendum campaigns: from elements to strategies
1
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan
2
Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan
3
Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG), Taipei, Taiwan
Received:
22
May
2022
Accepted:
23
July
2023
Published online:
11
August
2023
Due to the increasing prominence of social network services, political communication has experienced a paradigm shift. To communicate with internet users, politicians, candidates, and political organizations create fan pages. Initially, they provide text-only material on their pages; later, to increase engagement, they include photos, images, and videos. This paper investigates image-based political images in Taiwan for the first time during a nationwide referendum. Unlike an election, a referendum is a policy-based vote. We evaluate over 2000 Facebook images shared by the two most prominent political parties in order to comprehend the aspects of images and the tactics of political organizations. In addition, we examine the textual content, objects, and colors of the collected data. We find that the characteristics of propaganda materials vary between political groups. Nonetheless, the color strategies employed by both sides are equivalent, with each side utilizing its own representative colors for consolidation and the opponent’s colors for attacking.
Key words: Political propaganda / Social media / Election study / Referendum / Coloring strategy
© Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE 2023
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
