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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:6 (2019) ► pp.826–847

Instagram narratives in Trump’s America

Multimodal social media and mitigation of right-wing populism

ORCID logo | Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

This study investigates the ideological composition of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign on Instagram, a popular but little researched platform, and attempts to situate it within his broader campaign. To account for the multimodality of Instagram posts, an analytical framework combining methods of the discourse-historical approach and visual grammar is proposed. 330 posts were subjected to a semantic analysis, resulting in a network of discourse topics which defined the Instagram campaign. Trump’s Instagram posts, in contrast to his tweets, are shown to be mostly positive, refraining from nativist attacks on minorities and limiting personal attacks on Hillary Clinton. Trump methodically constructed the positive, populist ‘Man of the People’ image, although in-depth analysis of selected posts reveals his populism to be only superficially inclusive. These findings prompt a reflection on the existence of an internal cordon sanitaire in social media campaigns, a possibly detrimental phenomenon for right-wing populists.

Keywords: social media, right-wing populism, multimodality, narrative, critical discourse studies, political discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Populism, social media and political narratives
  • 3.Triangulation of methods: DHA and visual grammar
  • 4.Data collection and analysis
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19039.dob
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