Misleading Discourse on Instagram: A Multimodal Study of Latin American Presidential Candidates in the Face of COVID-19

Abstract

Instagram as a multimodal information network has helped politicians to position both their brand and their campaign. We analyzed whether the images and texts published during the pandemic contained misinformation. We studied from a multimodal perspective the Instagram accounts of the presidential candidates of four Latin American countries which held elections in 2021 to identify how much of the discourse was related to controlling the pandemic. The discourse was analyzed using different taxonomies. In the correlation between the discourse and following the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO), Chile stood out with the highest level of pandemic compliance; Peru and Ecuador were placed in the middle, while Honduras showed little if any interest. The conclusion was that politicians focused primarily on their campaigns and marginally on the pandemic. The omission of COVID-19 from most publications reflected a misinformative discourse which could potentially confuse the public.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• Instagram
• misinformation
• multimodal
• politics