Online information is increasingly visual in medium and diverse in platform source, complicating how users construct and engage with online rumoring campaigns. These trends pose a particular challenge to characterizing and countering harmful content, in particular false and misleading narratives. Prior work examining how to measure and mitigate the impact of such content predominately focuses on text data and mainstream social media platforms, leaving a gap in understanding. In this work, we examine the role of visual media within and across alt-tech platforms in the context of an election fraud online rumoring campaign. We conduct a case study of the "vote spikes" online rumoring campaign during the 2022 U.S. midterm election; we examine how associated image- and video-based media was shared, spread, and engaged with across 1,800 posts across five social media platforms. We characterize communities co-sharing content across alt-tech platforms, demonstrating that accounts within a platform share the same media, while the crossplatform user community is connected through a small number of news influencers. Additionally, while the inclusion of video boosts post engagement within this online rumoring campaign, the inclusion of visual media including static images is no different from text-only posts in terms of engagement. Further, news influencers may benefit financially from this online rumoring campaign, as 38% of posts with visual content included product promotions, often alongside of misleading election tropes and visual cues that imply authority through news-like settings and the incorporation of empirical data. We consider the implications of integrated monetization and harmful content on the dissemination of rumoring media, particularly considering the sharing of visuals across platforms. These findings provide a framework for evaluating visual content in online information campaigns and offer insights into the prevalence of harmful visual narratives across multiple platforms. Understanding what visual false and misleading narratives traverse platforms and yield user engagement can inform countermeasures.

PDF