Workshop Proceedings of the 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Workshop: CySoc 2025: 6th International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats

DOI: 10.36190/2025.21

Published: 2025-06-05
The Viral Nature of Symbols: Epidemiological Modeling of Visual Elements in Digital Information Campaigns
Sayantan Bhattacharya, Nitin Agarwal, Diwash Poudel

Visual content dominates the current digital environment, yet there are still some methodological issues concerning the analysis of symbolic elements in videos. This paper fills this gap by exploring frame extraction techniques from 302 TikTok and 1953 YouTube videos and quantifying symbolic transmission dynamics across social media platforms. After comparing different extraction methods, we observed that standout frames, which are the points of significant visual change, contained significantly more symbolic content than the first frames or thumbnails, which provided 59\% more symbols on TikT...