An Analysis of the Australian Political Discourse in Sponsored Social Media Content

Disinformation is deliberately designed to spread false information over internet. Recent concerns about the use of disinformation to manipulate political voting campaigns have attracted researchers’ attention. In this paper, we conduct our first study towards the understanding of how sponsored social media content is used in Australian voting campaigns. To this end, we collect the ad posts sponsored by Australian organizations on Facebook from 1 Feb, 2020 to 17 May, 2021. We also retain the screenshot of each collected ad that originally appeared on Facebook and download the images and videos that were presented in these ad posts. To obtain annotations of these ads, we generate labels that describe general objects, locations, activities presented in the images or videos by algorithms, as well as human created annotations over crowdsourcing platforms. Based on the collected human annotations, we then design a second-round crowdsourcing task to ask workers to provide more detailed annotations for the collected ads, ranging from truthfulness evaluation of the content to various political aspects (e.g., topics and sentiment). The multi-modal dataset created in our work enables future research, for example, to train supervised learning algorithms for further analysis on the use of disinformation on social media that may affect political campaigns.