Visual Elements in Political Social Media Posting by Brazilian Presidential Candidates

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, whose interest is in visual political communication across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in Brazil in the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Visual affordances are critically important in political campaigning, and such affordances continue to change; this works differently across different platforms, and cross-platform and/or multi-platform studies are therefore also critically important.

The project gathered some 23,000 images from the three platforms during the two presidential campaigns, focussing on the two presidential candidates; it used the Google Vision API to identify features in these images, weighted these images, and examined the most significant features for each specific platform. Common features relate to clothes, advertising, appearance, and screenshots.

Key types of images showed politicians in t-shirts at public rallies and in encounters with crowds and individual voters; politicians in suits during media appearances; or screenshots of social media posts; symbolic elements like flags and party colours were also often present. Their prevalence differed across platforms, however, in connection with the visual affordances and limitations of each platform. Fashion choices were relatively similar across platforms, perhaps showing that politicians were attempting to generate a consistent public image. Facebook and Twitter were more similar in all this than Instagram, where textual content takes more of a backseat role. Twitter also used more memes and cartoons than the other platforms.