Participatory Propaganda and Politics From the Bedroom (Studio): The Semiotics of Conservative Influencers on YouTube

<p dir="ltr">This paper interrogates recent developments in the communication practices of conservative social media influencers in the US and the means through which several have come to rival traditional media on YouTube. It highlights two case studies of highly successful influencer channels, <i>The Daily Wire’s The Comments Section</i> and <i>PragerU’s Unapologetic</i>, representative of such developments. Through a social semiotic analysis of an early sample of these video productions (n = 40), I examine the multimodal communicative practices employed to engage a specifically young audience. I find that these practices centered on a curated replication of the aesthetics of participatory cultures and news mediation through an ideologically conservative lens. Such findings serve to advance critiques of participatory cultures as “demotic” rather than democratic and illustrate the amenability of associated platform affordances to appropriation by professionalized conservative media projects.</p>