arXiv:2611.15042 · v1

Data Visualization Influencers: Tracing the Creation and Curation Strategies Behind Propagandist Visualizations on X

首次提交 2026-11-11 13:09

版本更新 2026-11-11 13:09

雷达观测 2026-11-13 10:09

摘要

Data visualization is increasingly understood as a political process shaped by creators' editorial design and data choices. Prior research has examined how such choices produce deceptive visualizations, focusing on social media users' misleading visualizations of public data. This overlooks how creators draw on professional expertise to produce propagandist visualizations of political narratives. We investigate visualization creators who design and share propagandist visualizations of political claims, such as immigration, criminality, and others, in US online discourse. Extending prior work on data visualization as propaganda, we present an exploratory study of 17 creators and the propagandist visualizations they create and curate for political discourse on X. We introduce the notion of a ``data visualization influencer'': an online creator who (1) leverages perceived credibility as a data expert, and (2) engages in epistemic capture of the credibility aesthetics of data and visualizations to manufacture propaganda. We discuss implications for research and practice.