The politics of social media: Utilizing political candidates’ Instagram posts to teach political argumentation and visual argument analysis

Analysis of political and visual arguments is a key exercise traditionally included in undergraduate argumentation courses. This activity teaches students how to identify and analyze political candidate arguments presented on visual social media platforms, demonstrating how argumentation theory applies to social media campaigns. In the exercise, students identify an active political candidate’s Instagram account and select a recent post for analysis, focusing primarily on evaluating the visual arguments created within the post. After the analysis, students present their findings to the class, including evidence of the most compelling visual arguments identified. This activity incorporates the use of a familiar visual medium to help students connect wargumentation theories and concepts with relevant social media messages they may encounter in their daily lives. It also capitalizes on students’ existing use of popular visual social media to introduce basic argumentation theory, political communication practices, and visual argument analysis techniques. Courses: This single-class activity is useful in undergraduate communication courses related to argumentation, political communication, and social media messaging. Relevant courses can include argumentation and advocacy, political argumentation, or visual argument analysis units of any course. For example, this activity can be successfully deployed in an Introduction to Political Communication course’s unit on the use of visual media during political campaigns. Objectives: The learning objectives of this activity are: (1) to analyze visual arguments as they appear on social media and (2) to identify specific elements of strong and weak political arguments on a visually dominant social media platform.