De los mítines a los memes

Expresiones públicas multimodales en la esfera digital durante las campañas electorales mexicanas de 2018 y 2024 en X

Abstract

Electoral campaigns have been transformed by the incorporation of social digital networks (RSD) as new spaces for political communication and citizen interaction. Since Obama’s 2008 campaign, the public sphere has expanded into the digital world, a phenomenon that became consolidated in Mexico in 2012. Although numerous studies address electoral behavior on social media—most of them from quantitative approaches that reduce citizens’ voices to numbers—a gap remains in the qualitative analysis of their expressions. This article examines how multimodal expressions are configured during the 2018 and 2024 campaigns on the X profiles of the winning candidates, how intertextualities and temporal dimensions are manifested in user discourses, and what discursive differences emerge. Based on a mixed-method approach and the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, findings show that in 2018 favorable expressions with references to the past predominated, whereas in 2024 critical stances projected toward the present and future prevailed. Visual resources—especially memes and edited images—shape users’ political positioning. We conclude that the digital public sphere not only reshapes political communication but also reveals discursive tensions and multimodal design preferences in users’ expressions. The results highlight the need for critical qualitative approaches that recognize the discursive agency of publics in digital environments during electoral contexts.