Abstract
Political memes have been previously studied in different contexts, but this study fills a gap in literature by employing a mixed method to provide insight into the discourses of fake news on Instagram. The author collected more than 550,000 Instagram posts sent by over 198,000 unique users from 24 February 2012 to 21 December 2018, using the hashtag #fakenews as a search term. The study uses topic modelling to identify the most recurrent topics that are dominant on the platform, while the most active users are identified to understand the nature of the online communities that discuss fake news. In addition, the study offers an analysis of visual metadata that accompanies Instagram images. The findings indicate that Instagram has become a weaponized toxic platform, and the largest community of active users are supporters of the US President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, mostly trolling liberal mainstream media especially CNN, while often aligning themselves with the far-right. On the other hand, a much smaller online community attempts to troll Trump and the Republicans. Theoretically, the study relies on political memes literature and argues that Instagram has become weaponized through an ongoing ‘Meme War,’ for many members in the two main online communities troll and attack each other to exert power on the platform.
Highlights
This study started as an exploratory one to investigate the hashtag #fakenews on Instagram, but the researcher was surprised to find the extent of political polarization, racism, and hate on this platform around this issue which prompted him to pursue this project in more detail since it was possible to collect data referencing to a hashtag on Instagram
This article focuses on political memes and how they are used in relation to fake news discourses on social media partly following the recommendation made by Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg (2009) on the importance of studying political memes and their diffusion
This study focuses on the examination of political memes in relation to fake news discourses on Instagram
Summary
This study started as an exploratory one to investigate the hashtag #fakenews on Instagram, but the researcher was surprised to find the extent of political polarization, racism, and hate on this platform around this issue which prompted him to pursue this project in more detail since it was possible to collect data referencing to a hashtag on Instagram. From a theoretical point of view, the article attempts to expand on the political memes literature by arguing that Instagram has become a weaponized platform despite its reputation in popular culture as a cool space for young people to post their selfies, food, and travel pictures. Unlike the case of other social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, the other unique aspect of this research study is that it investigates fake news discourses on Instagram as previous studies analyzed fake news on other social media platforms and mainstream media, as well as the use of bots (Al-Rawi, 2019a; Al-Rawi, Groshek, & Zhang, 2019; Lazer et al, 2018; Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral, 2018)
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