Detecting Calls to Action in Multimodal Content: Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign on Instagram

Michael Achmann-Denkler, Jakob Fehle, Mario Haim, Christian Wolff


Abstract
This study investigates the automated classification of Calls to Action (CTAs) within the 2021 German Instagram election campaign to advance the understanding of mobilization in social media contexts. We analyzed over 2,208 Instagram stories and 712 posts using fine-tuned BERT models and OpenAI’s GPT-4 models. The fine-tuned BERT model incorporating synthetic training data achieved a macro F1 score of 0.93, demonstrating a robust classification performance. Our analysis revealed that 49.58% of Instagram posts and 10.64% of stories contained CTAs, highlighting significant differences in mobilization strategies between these content types. Additionally, we found that FDP and the Greens had the highest prevalence of CTAs in posts, whereas CDU and CSU led in story CTAs.
Anthology ID:
2024.cpss-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences: Long and short papers
Month:
Sep
Year:
2024
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Christopher Klamm, Gabriella Lapesa, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Ines Rehbein, Indira Sen
Venues:
cpss | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–13
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cpss-1.1
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Achmann-Denkler, Jakob Fehle, Mario Haim, and Christian Wolff. 2024. Detecting Calls to Action in Multimodal Content: Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign on Instagram. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for the Political and Social Sciences: Long and short papers, pages 1–13, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Calls to Action in Multimodal Content: Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign on Instagram (Achmann-Denkler et al., cpss-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.cpss-1.1.pdf