Memes turned into weapons: scientists stated that they were used to ignite conflicts

In digital arenas filled with counterfeit images, rocky memes and videos with weapons, whole society is pushed to riots with one finger movement. In focus, technology appeared its Telegram channel. Subscribe to not miss the most info and interesting news from the world of science! What these visual signals actually mean and how they act as a harbinger of political violence - a question that scientists begin to answer with amazing clarity.

Professor of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nort-Dam, Tim Weinger, and Ernesto Verdeh, Associate Professor of the Department of Peace Research and Global Policy of the same university, are part of an interdisciplinary group that studies how visual content changes on the Internet during political crisis. Their research, published in Information, Communication and Society, showed that such changes are not accidental - they are systematic, strategic and deep.

For example, a few days before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian microbloggi flooded an application for sharing Telegram messages with manipulated images and instigating posts. The spike in activity was obvious: the total number of messages increased by almost 9,000%, and the number of image manipulations - by more than 5,000%. This influx of edited images, from misleading memes, was not accidental to deeply distorted photos.

It was designed for a maneuver to influence perception, to justify aggression and to put opponents incompetent or inhuman. One of the memes ridiculed the anti -Putin journalist Arkady Babchenko, using the superimposed text and replaced faces to humiliate his staged murder with Ukrainian intelligence. The phrase "gamers do not die, they are revived" was not just an internet humor-it was a rhetorical weapon designed for ridicule and delegitimation.

To identify and decipher these images, the Notre Dama command used a set of artificial intelligence tools specifically designed to detect digital changes. But no matter how advanced these systems may be, artificial intelligence alone cannot capture the political subtleties or cultural references laid down in the images. For example, a fake image of French President Macron, who sits next to a Ukrainian official, can be rejected by a car.

However, for the political scientist, this reflects an attempt to doubt among Ukrainians in European solidarity, contrasting the courage of one group and the indecision of another. The innovation of the team is to combine computing power with human insight. AI group visually similar content, but to unpack the meaning, linking manipulation schemes with broader narratives and geopolitical programs, is proved by experts. Thus, they convert data to predictions.

Visual memes, which were previously considered a digital little thing, now become the most important indicators of the upset. A convincing conclusion is the huge scale of the visual internet war. This study alone analyzed more than 6 million messages and 3 million images of almost a thousand Telegram accounts. And this is only one corner of the Internet.

As world conflicts continue to be conducted not only with the help of weapons, but also with the help of pixels, understanding how people manipulate people becomes extremely important. For politicians, this work offers more than just understanding - a warning system, a chance to notice a storm before it explodes. Earlier, Focus wrote about the obvious signs of psychopathy in people. Psychopaths are quite dangerous people who can easily hide in society until it becomes too late.