Visual political communication

Visual political communication

A world map showing the relative frequency of top-relevant YouTube videos including a given visual theme in different geographical regions, identified using deep neural network classifiers (Magnani and Segerberg, 2021).

Visual content, such as images, videos, and memes, plays a particularly important role in online communication: it can be persuasive, emotive, and affective, and is widely shared in online environments. For example, visual content plays an important symbolic, emotional and (dis)connecting role in political movements, where it becomes the focus of social and algorithmic negotiation. Part of our research addresses the methodological and empirical challenges related to the study of how visual content propagates online and how it becomes a beacon of political aggregation and polarisation.