When Memes Manipulate: Multimodal Tools of Disinformation

Memes are often viewed as jokes or simple internet humor but they have become highly effective tools for shaping opinions, framing public debate, and spreading manipulative narratives during major political and social events. This talk explores the role of memes within today’s information disorder ecosystem and how they combine images, text, and cultural references to communicate ideas quickly and emotionally, often in subtle ways, while also making them particularly challenging to analyze computationally. Building on this, the talk presents recent research on persuasion techniques in memes, followed by selected work on harmful and disinformation-related meme analysis. It concludes by discussing recent work on unified multilingual and multitask vision-language models for meme understanding, motivated by the need to move beyond isolated datasets and narrowly specialized detection systems toward more generalizable and context-aware multimodal reasoning.