#Legislativas2022: The Hashtag’s Appropriations on Instagram in the 2022 Portuguese Elections

Abstract

Instagram plays a fundamental role in contemporary electoral campaigns but is still lacking research in the Portuguese context. This paper will analyze the appropriations of the hashtag #legislativas2022 carried out by political actors on Instagram during the 2022 Elections in Portugal. To this end, we will consider user engagement, the clusters and networks of the hashtags used, as well as the computational analysis of images with the help of the Google Vision API, with a view to labels and web entities. The results of the user analysis point to the prevalence of profiles of political parties, the mainstream press and party leaders in the public debate; the images mostly represent the coverage of political events and the day to day of the campaign; the hashtags suggest the strength of the profiles of regional cells of the parties and of supporters. Finally, the results point to the distinctive character of the Chega party's electoral campaign, which, unlike the others, explicitly sought to identify who or what it opposed, being identified with right-wing populism.