Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism

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Future studies should expand the investigation to platforms that we cannot explore here, because in the Hungarian context, they are not extensively used for political communication. Text can be added to them, but it appears below the pictures, and visuals still dominate the posts with their size.

We expect that politicians on social media platforms predominantly use visual communication to personalize their appearance (H1). By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. Darren Jones, the Labour chair of the business select committee, tweeted on Wednesday: “The real question is: how can anyone know if a photo is a deepfake? This was the first election when politicians intensively used it; therefore, they may have lacked the relevant expertise needed to run an effective campaign on it. The repeated reproduction of specific photographic images has led to an iconization, which visualizes the ongoing struggle through focusing on the likenesses of concrete figures and memorializing those who have passed away.What I found was that you can analyse things visually or in a multi-sensory way and can create meaning and feeling without using words. The Pensive Photograph as Agent: What Can Non-Illustrative Images Do to Galvanize Public Support for Climate Change Action? This article by Darren Lilleker, Anastasia Veneti, and Daniel Jackson originally appeared at The Conversation, a Social Science Space partner site, under the title “ Images Matter: The Power of the Visual in Political Communication. Hand (2012) argues that we live in the age of “ubiquitous photography,” which is also underlined by statistics: Each day people upload 300 million photos to Facebook, and 95 million photos to Instagram ( Stout 2019).

Cultural and political references help understand the cultural and political object of messages: Through “popular-cultural” references, politicians can show their human face and create a more informal and ordinary atmosphere. Instagram has a smaller but still significant user base with 26 percent of the online population registered on it, but only 7 percent of them receive news from it ( Newman et al. The printing houses of early modern times played an essential role in creating, disseminating and reviewing authorial portraits.

While we expect that on both platforms visuals are primarily used for candidate personalization, based on the differences discussed above, we assume that visual political communication on Instagram is more informal and thereby more focused on the privatization dimension of personalization than on Facebook (H2), while on Instagram images should be used to display more informal aspects of candidates’ life, relevant to the individualization dimension of personalization (H3). While it was not clear whether the image of Sunak had been manipulated using an AI tool, such programs have made it easier and quicker to produce convincing fake text, images and audio. Widely televised environmentalist actions are analyzed in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views.

When text is added to the post, visuals appear below it, suggesting it is more of an illustration to the textual message. If politicians use AI in any form they need to ensure that it carries some kind of mark that informs the public,” said Ghosn. Oppositional politicians (72 percent) and men (79 percent) are overrepresented among politicians who use both platforms, whose median age is forty-one.

To understand political actors’ visual communication strategies, we specify our RQ1 and adopt a cross-platform approach to explore what features can be considered general characteristics of social media visual communication (RQ1a), and what the platform-specific strategies are (RQ1b). Interestingly, images that were posted on both platforms are closer to a typical Instagram than Facebook post. It is important to emphasize that we do not code whether an image is individualized or privatized per se.