Misinformation campaign analysis
Extract data from from social media images and texts in disinformation campaigns.
This project is currently under development!
Use the pre-processed social media posts (image files) and process to collect information:
- Cropping images to remove comments from posts
- Text extraction from the images
- Language recognition, translation into English, cleaning of the text/spell-check
- Sentiment and subjectivity analysis
- Performing person and face recognition in images, emotion recognition
- Extraction of other non-human objects in the image
This development will serve the fight to combat misinformation, by providing more comprehensive data about its content and techniques. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a computer-assisted toolset to investigate the content of disinformation campaigns worldwide.
Installation
The misinformation package can be installed using pip: Navigate into your package folder misinformation/ and execute
pip install .
This will install the package and its dependencies locally.
Installation on Windows
Some modules use lavis to anaylse image content. To enable this functionality on Windows OS, you need to install some dependencies that are not available by default or can be obtained from the command line:
- Download Visual C++ and install (see also here).
- Then install the coco API from Github
pip install "git+https://github.com/philferriere/cocoapi.git#egg=pycocotools&subdirectory=PythonAPI"
- Now you can install the package by navigating to the misinformation directory and typing
pip install .
in the command prompt.
Usage
There are sample notebooks in the misinformation/notebooks folder for you to explore the package:
- Text analysis: Use the notebook
get-text-from-image.ipynbto extract any text from the images. The text is directly translated into English. If the text should be further analysed, set the keywordanalyse_texttoTrueas demonstrated in the notebook.
You can run this notebook on google colab: Here
Place the data files and google cloud vision API key in your google drive to access the data. - Facial analysis: Use the notebook
facial_expressions.ipynbto identify if there are faces on the image, if they are wearing masks, and if they are not wearing masks also the race, gender and dominant emotion. You can run this notebook on google colab: Here
Place the data files in your google drive to access the data.** - Object analysis: Use the notebook
ojects_expression.ipynbto identify certain objects in the image. Currently, the following objects are being identified: person, bicycle, car, motorcycle, airplane, bus, train, truck, boat, traffic light, cell phone.
There are further notebooks that are currently of exploratory nature (colors_expression.ipynb to identify certain colors on the image).
Features
Text extraction
The text is extracted from the images using google-cloud-vision. For this, you need an API key. Set up your google account following the instructions on the google Vision AI website.
You then need to export the location of the API key as an environment variable:
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="location of your .json"
The extracted text is then stored under the text key (column when exporting a csv).
Googletrans is used to recognize the language automatically and translate into English. The text language and translated text is then stored under the text_language and text_english key (column when exporting a csv).
If you further want to analyse the text, you have to set the analyse_text keyword to True. In doing so, the text is then processed using spacy (tokenized, part-of-speech, lemma, ...). The English text is cleaned from numbers and unrecognized words (text_clean), spelling of the English text is corrected (text_english_correct), and further sentiment and subjectivity analysis are carried out (polarity, subjectivity). The latter two steps are carried out using TextBlob. For more information on the sentiment analysis using TextBlob see here.