Platform spectacle and populism in YouTube videos of COVID-19 protests

Taking YouTube videos of COVID-19 protests as a case study, this article seeks to understand how protesting breaks into our global spaces of publicity as a platform spectacle of populism. It contextualizes research on spectacles within platform studies with an emphasis on the ritualistic orientation that social media catalyze toward content-making/sharing. It also offers an integrative approach to populism that centers on the discursive and ideological role of content itself in rearticulating rituals of performing protest into rituals forging belonging to the people-as-victim, or victimization rituals. The article employs a multimodal and intertextual methodology to analyze such rituals in the YouTube video-spectacles of COVID-19 protests –police brutality, rioting, and testimonials – and reflect upon the populist politics of belonging and counter-belonging that they serve: a power struggle over algorithmically recognizable victims of pandemic biopolitics and pandemic revolutionism, not necessarily engagement with the systemically and unequally vulnerable to the pandemic itself.