Abstract
Political communication increasingly takes on visual forms. Yet, despite their ubiquity in everyday communication and digital campaigning, the use of these visuals remains critically understudied. In this article, we investigate the formats and modes of visual content deployed by Twitter users over a two-week period leading up to the 2019 EU Parliamentary elections and across two publics: those discussing the election at large and those discussing the more contentious issue of EU membership. Conducting a multilingual, cross-comparative content and thematic analysis of a sample of 1,097 images, we find that<em>: </em>(1) Visuals originating from traditional political actors prevailed among both Twitter discourses; (2) users shared substantial amounts of anti-EU, populist and, to a lesser extent, extremist images, though this content remained largely disjointed from the mainstream public debate; and (3) political humor emerged as a vector for anti-establishment and Eurosceptic themes, especially in discussions critical of the European project. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of visual political communication and social media manipulation.
Highlights
We live in an age of visual communication: From the rise of selfies, memes and animated GIFs in digital culture to the surging popularity of visual-centric platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok that reach billions of monthly users across the world
While political parties and campaign managers have traditionally relied on leaflets, posters, and TV spots to rally support, the advent of digital technologies, and social media has seen political actors integrate new visual media strategies into their everyday communicative practices
We find that while traditional visual formats dominate across both Twitter conversations, hybrid content in the form of memes, annotated screenshots and remixed media have emerged as popular modes of visual communication
Summary
We live in an age of visual communication: From the rise of selfies, memes and animated GIFs in digital culture to the surging popularity of visual-centric platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok that reach billions of monthly users across the world. Visual content in the form of photos, videos, infographics and user-generated images are becoming central to our day-to-day interactions online, informing how we present ourselves (Senft & Baym, 2015; Thomson & Greenwood, 2020), communicate and understand the world around us (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Pearce et al, 2020). Image sharing has recently seen a surge in popularity, on visualcentric platforms and on Twitter, where over 50% of tweet impressions in 2019 were associated with images or other visual media (Meeker, 2019). Retouched Twitter profile pictures, vlogs from the campaign trail, Instagram livestreams, and staged photo ops capturing seemingly candid moments have become staples of the arsenal of contemporary electioneering
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