Understanding the Use of Fauxtography on Social Media

Understand

Despite the influence that image-based communication has on online discourse, the role played by images in disinformation is still not well understood.

• In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of fauxtography, analyzing the use of manipulated or misleading images in news discussion on online communities.
• First, we develop a computational pipeline geared to detect fauxtography, and identify over 61k instances of fauxtography discussed on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit.
• Then, we study how posting fauxtography affects engagement of posts on social media, finding that posts containing it receive more interactions in the form of re-shares, likes, and comments.