A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the Canadian Federal Election Candidates Justin Trudeau’s and Stephen Harper’s Facebook Pages (August 1st, 2015 _ October 19th, 2015)

Abstract

Through investigating the elections carried out recently, it was found that the social media platforms have recently grown in importance as a place for political activism. These sites, such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, offer ways to engage citizens in political life. Politicians and political parties use such platforms to communicate with the potential constituents, present their agenda and plans faster, measure the people satisfaction with them, express their opinions about the different issues, collect donations and organize events (Tenhunen & Karvelyte, 2015). This research sheds light on the Canadian Federal elections, especially the one that was held in 2015 between Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper with a close focus on their official Facebook pages. There was a fierce competition between the two candidates’ Facebook pages at the level of posts, photos and videos to gain as much support as they can. These pages enable us to analyze the visual and linguistic modes and discover how they work together. This research attempts to prove that visuals, such as images, are of the same importance as the verbal language since they also convey important messages and subtle ideologies. In this thesis, the timeline posts, both images and captions, in the Facebook pages of both candidates are to be analyzed using the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach introduced by Machin and Mayr (2012). 1. Objectives This thesis aims to highlight and compare the linguistic and visual techniques used by the candidates in their Facebook pages to persuade the constituents to vote in favor of them; discover how the linguistic and visual modes work together, complement each other and contribute to the information of the candidates’ identity; detect which