Visuals and Moralisation: Patriotic Pride and Shaming Through Visual Communication in the 2022 Hungarian Parliamentary Elections on Facebook

This chapter investigates moral emotions in social media-based visual political communication and their effects on user engagement. Specifically, we focus on the extent and the ways political actors use self-conscious moral emotions in their visuals, and the effects of these in terms of emotional reactions on Facebook. For that, we apply quantitative and qualitative visual content analyses on the visual Facebook posts (N = 2440) of Hungarian political parties and candidates in the 2022 Hungarian Parliamentary Election campaign. Results suggest that although visual depiction of moral emotions is rare, patriotic symbols as signs of patriotic pride are relatively frequently presented. Also, followers are generally receptive to these symbols with more love reactions.