The nature of visual disinformation online: A aualitative content analysis of alternative and social media in the Netherlands

Online political disinformation often relies on decontextualized or manipulated images. Visual content can make disinformation more attention-grabbing and credible as it offers a direct index of reality. Yet, most research to date has mapped the salience and nature of disinformation by exclusively focusing on textual content. Responding to urgent calls in the literature, this paper relies on an inductive qualitative analysis of visual disinformation disseminated by alternative media platforms. Based on the analysis, we propose a typology of different applications of visuals in disinformation: (1) Signaling legitimacy and adherence to conventional news values through seemingly unrelated images; (2) illustrating authoritative expert consensus through the visualization of disinformation by alternative experts; (3) emphasizing widespread social support for unconventional truth claims through the inclusion of visuals depicting the vox populi; (4) offering decontextualized proof for conspiracy theories and counter-factual claims. This typology intends to inform future empirical research that aims to detect disinformation narratives across different (digital) contexts.