AI RESEARCH
Seeing Candidates at Scale: Multimodal LLMs for Visual Political Communication on Instagram
arXiv CS.CV
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ArXi:2604.19489v1 Announce Type: new This paper presents a computational that evaluates the capabilities of specialized machine learning models and emerging multimodal large language models for Visual Political Communication (VPC) analysis. Focusing on concentrated visibility in Instagram stories and posts during the 2021 German federal election campaign, we compare the performance of traditional computer vision models (FaceNet512, RetinaFace, Google Cloud Vision) with a multimodal large language model (GPT-4o) in identifying front-runner politicians and counting individuals in images.