Guy Next Door and Implausibly Attractive Young Women: The Visual Frames of Social Media Propaganda
| Autor: | Marco T. Bastos, Fábio Gomes Goveia, Dan Mercea |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
QA75
Sociology and Political Science media_common.quotation_subject 050801 communication & media studies HN HM 0508 media and communications Agency (sociology) 050602 political science & public administration Narrative Visual communication Social media Sociology Disinformation Social identity theory Affordance media_common Internet Research Agency business.industry Communication 05 social sciences General Engineering Media studies 0506 political science Masculinity Propaganda The Internet Visual framing business |
| ISSN: | 1461-4448 |
| Popis: | This study introduces a mixed-methods approach to classifying the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five key propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), including Russian and American partisan groups. We manually coded profile images and subsequently applied qualitative and quantitative processing to the images. The visual motifs identified in IRA Twitter profiles allowed us to explore how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identify and heroic masculinity. Indeed, the results show that the visual frames employed by the Internet Research Agency are designed to embody the vox populi with relatable, familiar, or attractive faces of ordinary people. The results also show that IRA influence operations displayed cultural acuity and familiarity with the social identity of their targets, and that the visual narrative it crafted trafficked primarily in the tropes of regular guys or implausibly attractive young women. We discuss these findings and argue that state propaganda has effectively attuned to both subcultural and visual affordances of social platforms. Twitter, Inc. Check for published version during checkdate report - AC |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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