The Facebook Memes on Pakistan's Political Personalities: Exploring Visual and Textual Frames

Abstract

This study analyzed the depiction of political personalities of Pakistan through 500 Facebook memes. Five famous politicians were selected for this research, including Imran Khan, Maryam Nawaz, Bilawal Bhutto, Nawaz Shareef, and Shafqat Mehmood. The Facebook memes were taken from the top-ranked ten memes' pages from November 2020 to January 2021. By applying framing theory, analysis is based on visual and textual frames, Personal Attacks, Satire, Morality, Incompetent leader, camera angles, shots, and emotions. The purposive sampling technique was used for the sampling procedure to gather trending Facebook memes on the selected politicians. The findings highlight how political personalities are represented in contemporary social media platforms and suggest that, among all the textual frames, Incompetent leader has secured the highest frequency than other competing frames. It was also observed that every political was framed with a particular viewpoint on Facebook memes. Through visual frames, it was depicted that through the Camera Angles, Eye-level angle (Negative) received more frequency than the other two angles, while in Shots, Medium shots (Neutral) received the highest frequency as compared other two shots and lastly, among Emotions, Sarcastic category secured the maximum frequency and thus, framing observed as an integral process in memes construction on political personalities. The study contributes towards the evolving literature of memes and the representation of political personalities on social media platforms. Thus, it allows for a detailed understanding of internet memes and their utilization, the frames they used for Political personalities, and how memes are becoming popular tools on digital media, typically in social media sites.