MUWS 2026 - The 5th International Workshop on Multimodal Human Understanding for the Web and Social Media

Chiao-I Tseng is an Associate Professor in Communication in the Department of Applied Information Technology at the University of Gothenburg. Her work integrates large-scale multimodal discourse analysis with computational and digital methods, as well as cognitive approaches such as eye-tracking and comprehension studies. Using these tools, she examines how film and video structures shape and influence viewers’ narrative interpretations.

Abstract: TikTok has become a primary news environment for digital audiences, and the rise of TikTok journalism raises pressing questions. How do mainstream news channels adapt to social media logics in order to stay relevant to younger audiences? How are alternative media and influencers reshaping the news landscape? And do platform-native actors rely on different narrative strategies to establish and maintain credibility? Addressing these questions empirically requires a framework for systematically analysing and comparing the news narrative approaches adopted across very different news actors, such as public service media, populist outlets, market-driven news institutions, and influencers who command young audiences’ trust through personal authenticity and charisma. Current scholarship on social media news remains largely text-centred, and the studies that do attend to more complex narrative strategies typically rest on close readings of a handful of video clips. This talk introduces a framework for studying multimodal news narrative strategies on TikTok at scale. We present a novel method that combines qualitative multimodal discourse analysis with large-scale computational analysis of news videos, together with a multimodal annotation scheme that supports systematic annotation across formal, semantic and narrative patterns. This combination allows us to move from illustrative examples to empirically robust comparative analysis, and to address the transformation and logics of TikTok journalism across the broad social media news landscape rather than within a single outlet. The work presented in this talk is carried out within TACTik: Transformation and Consequences of News on TikTok, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

• 11:00 – 11:20: The Geometry of World-Event News: Cross-Day Drift and Within-Day Dispersion by Weijian Fan et al.
• 11:20 – 11:40: Who Judges the Frame? Auditing Multimodal LLM Judges for News Framing Across Event-Level Perspectives by Antonela Tommasel & Markus Schedl
• 11:40 – 12:00: When Model Outputs Become Social Evidence: Challenges for LLM-Mediated Web and Social Media Analysis by Antonela Tommasel & Markus Schedl

• 14:10 – 14:30: A Multimedia Perspective on the Study of Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models by Markus Schedl et al.
• 14:30 – 14:50: FashionTwin: A Holistic Benchmark for the Perception of AI-Generated Images in Fashion by Marina Paolanti et al.