Humor, Memes, and Brat Green: Use of Humorous Attacks within the Harris Campaign on Instagram

Abstract

Since the 2008 Obama campaign, there has been an expected form of interaction by presidential campaigns on social media platforms, but Donald Trump's distinct use of X as an avenue for rapid and inflammatory attacks against political opponents upended this norm. Media attention on the Harris 2024 campaign use of social media via Kamala HQ possibly points towards a new avenue of driving engagement with attacks by a Democratic candidate contrasting that of Trump. Given the lack of research on the use of Instagram accounts by large U.S. political campaigns and the change in traits in social media posts from the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns, this raises questions about the use of the Instagram platform by the Harris campaign. To what extent do the frequency of posting habits, and the content of posts differ between the rapid response account Kamala HQ and Kamala Harris' personal account? Additionally, how does engagement from users differ across the two accounts and types of content? More specifically, I ask: How does the use of non-attack, traditional attack, humorous attack, and humorous meme attack content on the rapid response account Kamala HQ and Kamala Harris' personal account differ? Additionally, how does user engagement differ across types of posts both within and across the two accounts? To answer these questions, I use two Instagram accounts associated with Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign. I first analyze the differences in content type, frequency, follower count, and potential measurements across the two accounts. Following this, I analyze the differences in the frequency, and user engagement with, non-attacks, traditional attacks, humorous attacks, and humorous meme attacks on the two accounts. I find that Kamala HQ posted more frequently over the course of the campaign, while Kamala Harris' personal account gained more followers. Additionally, I find that non-attacks see the highest engagement on both accounts, but the rapid response account Kamala HQ saw greater engagement on attacks than Kamala Harris' personal account. I also find that Kamala HQ posted attacks, especially humorous attacks, at a greater rate than the candidate's account. Surprisingly, the candidate's personal account posted no humorous attacks despite humor being authentic to the candidate herself.