I 🌹🍀🇫🇮 You! - Emojis as Emotional-Political Signifiers in Finnish Election Campaign Discussion Online

Abstract

Social media platforms and the forms of vernacular expression they support invite citizens to emotionally react to political content. This study focuses on the affective networks of emoji use in the Facebook comment threads on 18 politicians’ public pages before the Finnish 2019 parliamentary elections. We aim to generate a holistic understanding of the use of emojis in campaign communications while providing a more profound understanding of the affective practices emerging in specific contexts, such as in relation to particular political actors. We analyze the data using computational methods and network analysis and complement this with qualitative analysis. The results indicate that emojis are used to connect with ideological coalitions across the parties and to reinforce connections with political actors. Particular emojis become distinctive emotional-political signifiers whose connotations have departed from their original denotations and are formed and shared in specific communities in relation to specific actors.