Exploring Counter-Imaging in Online Political Advertisements During Elections Campaigns: A Case of South African Main Opposition Parties

This article contends that visual depictions within online political advertisements during South Africa’s 2021 and 2024 local and national government elections employed counter-imaging as a visual rhetorical strategy. These visual rhetorical manoeuvres, being ideological and inherently subjective, are intricately crafted to either legitimise or undermine political issues and actors subtly. The study employed a research methodology grounded in visual discourse analysis to scrutinise the underlying visual rhetoric embedded within chosen visual representations from the online political advertisements of South Africa’s main opposition parties: the ActionSA, Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The findings of this research divulge that the selected visual representations strategically undermine the legitimacy of the ruling African National Congress (ANC)-led government.