Understanding the Political Ideology of Legislators from Social Media Images

Understand

In this paper, we seek to understand how politicians use images to express ideological rhetoric through Facebook images posted by members of the U.S.

• House and Senate.
• In the era of social media, politics has become saturated with imagery, a potent and emotionally salient form of political rhetoric which has been used by politicians and political organizations to influence public sentiment and voting behavior for well over a century.
• To date, however, little is known about how images are used as political rhetoric.