Oct 22, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save
Gabriella Bollici, Stefano De Giorgis, Wouter Van Atteveldt, Filip Ilievski
Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam · Department of Communication Science, Faculty of Social Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
As polarization grows on social media, understanding how political memes shape online narratives has become increasingly important. Previous research has relied on either qualitative frameworks that are hard to scale or computational methods that lack theoretical grounding. Both approaches treat narrative categories in isolation and focus exclusively on moral portrayals of identity. To address these limitations, we introduce a framework grounded in social science theories, encompassing three categories: social identities (such as gender, politics, and ethnicity), viewpoints (ingroup and outgroup perspectives), and narrative roles (moral character, intelligence, status, and power). Building on this framework, we present IRON-Meme, a human-annotated benchmark comprising 1,110 political memes across substantially more templates than existing benchmarks. Our analysis of IRON-Meme shows that most memes assign derogatory roles and that identities, roles, and templates are systematically interconnected. Evaluation of nine vision-language models indicates that frontier-scale and reasoning models achieve the highest performance, while accuracy on social identities and narrative roles decreases for less frequent labels. Incorporating template background knowledge does not enhance narrative role classification, suggesting that meme interpretation relies on how memes are adapted for specific communicative purposes. We make IRON-Meme and our code publicly available.