FROM TOP-DOWN TO BOTTOM-UP: POLITICAL IMAGE MANAGEMENT AND THE PRESERVATION OF WHITE SUPREMACY THROUGH VISUALS AND MEMES ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Social media platforms play an increasing role in politics,facilitating the circulation of populist texts disseminated by politicians, officialcampaign media, and user-generated content, all of which contribute to voters’ perceptionsof politicians and political issues. The networks and affordances of social media platformsallow for the development of an individualized, affective connection with voters, which is aparticularly important strategy for far-right politicians, who are often stigmatized.Furthermore, social media enables the circulation of user-generated materials in a form ofdigital political participation, allowing citizens to respond in real-time to politicaldevelopments. While digital political participation ostensibly offers the potential for theexpression of marginalized perspectives, digital texts predominantly emphasize and enforceexisting hierarchies, particularly the supremacy of whiteness. This panel explores visualsand memes circulated on social media through the lenses of platform studies, whitenessstudies, nostalgia, and Critical Discourse Analysis. By examining both “top-down” mediadisseminated by public figures and “bottom-up” user-generated content, this panel providesan in-depth understanding of the social media ecosystems that work to preserve and extendfar-right values and white supremacy. Rachel Winter focuses on the influence of officialcampaign materials on user-generated content, as well as the impacts of both on candidateimage management and the racial hierarchy of the United States. An analysis ofrepresentations of race in user-generated Rafael “Ted” Cruz and Robert “Beto” O’Rourke memesreveals an embedded valuation of whiteness and white supremacy to the detriment of otherracial demographics. Political memes collected from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr,and Reddit uphold the importance of the white racial identity of candidates and, in sodoing, attempt to preserve White American identities from the perceived threat ofmulticulturalism embodied in racially diverse politicians and their constituents. JuliaDeCook examines nostalgia and chronotopes in alt-right memes, contending that the emphasison “tradition” over “progress” is an attempt to unify the alt-right and preserve whiteidentity and supremacy from threats of globalization and feminism. The alt-right createsvirtual nation-states that use consistent linguistic strategies to enable these groups toengage in a form of collective action. Examining white supremacist memes from Reddit andInstagram, Panelist 2 explores the ways that time, memory, and the abstract conception of“the past” are used in digital propaganda to appeal to younger voters and emphasize the myththat whiteness must be protected from the threat of multiculturalism.