Fighting corruption through visuals and satire: examples of two online protest actions from South Asia

In the past decades, multiple civil society actors across the world have addressed the issue of corruption to mobilize knowledge on this widespread problem. Actors participating in these movements have made use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to speak up on contentious issues, often targetting their governments and demanding accountability from those in power. Examples include anti-corruption movement that developed in 2011 in India (Chowdhury and Abid 2019), anti-austerity protests in Spain and other countries (della Porta 2017), the youth-led anti-corruption protests that occurred in Guatemala in 2015 (Flores 2019), the environmental protests in Romania between 2016 and 2017 (Olteanu and Beyerle 2018), and the pro-democracy protests of the Hirak movement in Algeria (Mattoni and Sigillò 2022). Extant scholarship shows that social media can provide a space even in less democratic and authoritarian societies to spread information that is contentious in nature. (see for example, Eltantawy & Wiest, 2011; Sorour & Dey, 2014). In this paper, using two case studies from India and Bangladesh, I show how civil society actors in repressed contexts make use of visuals to convey humorous and even satirical messages to discuss contentious issues via social media. The two cases under scrutiny in this paper are a) the still running Facebook page of India’s biggest anti-corruption protest that took place in 2011-12, and b) Facebook posts that resulted from an online outrage against fake COVID-19 tests in Bangladesh in July 2020. Both these cases are online actions taken by the public against their respective governments because they were indignant about the systemic corruption prevalent in their countries. Using a corpus of 250 images and inspired by Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s (2011) four levels of visual framing, the paper proposes a revised schema for visual framing analysis and includes contextual dimensions in studying visuals as tools enhancing public debates on corruption and anti-corruption practices. Analysing the Facebook images, the paper argues that humour and satire are oft-used mechanisms by civil society to address grand corruption as they allow subtext and subtlety instead of direct confrontation. Studies on the role of visuals in the struggle against corruption are still rare, despite the growing literature that explores the role of visuals to mobilise protests, to tease out the tensions in democratic and non-democratic settings and to produce debates with hitherto unarticulated stimuli (Doerr, Mattoni, and Teune 2015; Mattoni and Teune 2014; McGarry et al. 2019; Rovisco and Veneti 2017). This article contributes to expand knowledge on how civil society actors employ visuals to sustain their anti-corruption efforts and, in so doing, it contributes to understanding how images, cartoons, posters and other visuals might be employed to fight corruption from the grassroots. Through the examples of the South Asian cases, focusing on the visuals shared by them on their respective Facebook pages, the paper shows how these civil society actors navigate through the complexities of online surveillance and politicisation of anti-corruption narratives in their countries to reach out to the larger public.