ABSTRACT With the growing popularity of visual-centred social media, authoritarian populist parties are provided with more platforms and devices to position themselves as key securitising actors by engaging in the visual securitisation of issues related to immigration, law and order. This paper uses the 2022 Swedish electoral campaign as a case study to explore the securitisation in the visual discourse of authoritarian populist actors by comparing the Sweden Democrats to the mainstream right. Through a combination of thematic and multimodal critical discourse analyses, this study examined a total of 639 Instagram posts. It shows how the Sweden Democrats use semiotic strategies to represent social actors in a way that conveys the message of securitisation. The findings reveal that the authoritarian populist party adopts a visual securitising style that not only includes apparent populist aspects and relies on the linguistic elements to counterbalance the ambiguity of the image, but it is also distinct from the discursive style of the mainstream right.