Enhancing the fairness of offensive memes detection models by mitigating unintended political bias

Abstract

This paper tackles the critical challenge of detecting and mitigating unintended political bias in offensive meme detection. Political memes are a powerful tool that can be used to influence public opinion and disrupt voters’ mindsets. However, current visual-linguistic models for offensive meme detection exhibit unintended bias and struggle to accurately classify non-offensive and offensive memes. This can harm the fairness of the democratic process either by targeting minority groups or promoting harmful political ideologies. With Hindi being the fifth most spoken language globally and having a significant number of native speakers, it is essential to detect and remove Hindi-based offensive memes to foster a fair and equitable democratic process. To address these concerns, we propose three debiasing techniques to mitigate the overrepresentation of majority group perspectives while addressing the suppression of minority opinions in political discourse. To support our approach, we curate a comprehensive dataset called Pol_Off_Meme, designed especially for the Hindi language. Empirical analysis of this dataset demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed debiasing techniques in reducing political bias in internet memes, promoting a fair and equitable democratic environment. Our debiased model, named \(DRTIM^{Adv}_{Att}\) , exhibited superior performance compared to the CLIP-based baseline model. It achieved a significant improvement of +9.72% in the F1-score while reducing the False Positive Rate Difference (FPRD) by -16% and the False Negative Rate Difference (FNRD) by -14.01%. Our efforts strive to cultivate a more informed and inclusive political discourse, ensuring that all opinions, irrespective of their majority or minority status, receive adequate attention and representation.