The project, Affective populism: the significance of emotions in populist discourse on TikTok

The project, Affective populism: the significance of emotions in populist discourse on TikTok, builds on and refocus previous work on Sweden democrat supporters in social media during the last EU election. The study is a substudy in a larger European research project studying emotions in populist supporter discourse during the EU election 2024 and explores the utilization of various semiotic resources to express and evoke affect in the communication between populist parties and their supporters. The project has an ethnographic approach and has observed the interaction on Sweden democrat (and associated) accounts 240429– 240616. The ethnographic data consists of field notes and an observation protocol documenting content, affective resources and interaction.

After categorizing and organizing the data, the 30 most interacted posts were selected for downloading and analysis. The comments were downloaded using export comments, and the posts (incl. film clips) were downloaded with assistance from Johan Frid at the Humanities Lab at Lund university. The first 100 comments on each post were then selected for further analysis, in total 3000 comments.

The analysis, which is ongoing, combines a content analysis with an analysis of affective verbal and visual resources in both posts and comments. To this, an analysis of stance and positioning in the comments is added.