THE WEAPONIZATION OF AESTHETICS: A CRITICAL STUDY ON GRAPHIC DESIGN AND EMOTIONAL POLARIZATION IN DIGITAL POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS

Abstract Digital politics today has moved beyond words to a fully fledged arsenal of visual communication design that uses the full range of the designer's typographic, chromatic, hierarchical, humorous, and AI-powered graphic techniques to target citizens with precision weaponry of emotional manipulation and partisan divisiveness. Drawing on the theories of visual communication design, political communication, advertising, and digital media, this paper contends that particular design decisions are never simply aesthetic, but are always interventions in the emotional politics of the citizen which aim to circumvent reason and polarise political loyalties. The paper proposes "aesthetic coercion" as a term to describe the coordinated use of visual communication design as a weapon of emotional divisiveness, and explores the five key vectors of aesthetic coercion in the contemporary digital political advertising environment: typographic authority, chromatic signaling, humor-as-propaganda in meme culture, AI-generated synthetic imagery, and algorithmic amplification. Importantly, the paper reveals that these vectors are not discrete elements, but rather form an integrated visual system whereby the language of commercial advertising has been consciously co-opted and weaponized for political communication. The analysis ends with a consideration of design literacy, critical design and platform reform as the most-seeming civic responses to a democracy whose visual culture has been totally weaponized.