  Propaganda can be defined as a form of communication that aims to influence
the opinions or the actions of people towards a specific goal; this is achieved
by means of well-defined rhetorical and psychological devices. Propaganda, in
the form we know it today, can be dated back to the beginning of the 17th
century. However, it is with the advent of the Internet and the social media
that it has started to spread on a much larger scale than before, thus becoming
major societal and political issue. Nowadays, a large fraction of propaganda in
social media is multimodal, mixing textual with visual content. With this in
mind, here we propose a new multi-label multimodal task: detecting the type of
propaganda techniques used in memes. We further create and release a new corpus
of 950 memes, carefully annotated with 22 propaganda techniques, which can
appear in the text, in the image, or in both. Our analysis of the corpus shows
that understanding both modalities together is essential for detecting these
techniques. This is further confirmed in our experiments with several
state-of-the-art multimodal models.
