With the rapid rise of social media usage and its integration into daily life, platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram have emerged as essential tools for political communication. Political actors use these platforms to attract voters, exercise opposition to governmental policies, polarize public opinion, and comment on political agendas. This article focuses on the analysis of populist political communication on Instagram by three far-right political leaders—Italian Prime Minister and President of Fratelli d’Italia Giorgia Meloni (European Conservatives and Reformists), President of Elliniki Lysi and Member of Parliament Kyriakos Velopoulos (European Conservatives and Reformists), and the leader of Groupe Rassemblement National and Member of Parliament Marine Le Pen (Patriots for Europe)—during the 2024 European Parliament elections. The analysis centers on three main aspects of Instagram posts: linguistic strategies, thematic content, and audience engagement. Initially, the study examines the linguistic strategies of these politicians, such as the use of simple, comprehensible phrases combined with emotionally charged images. Their posts primarily emphasize nationalist values, cultural identity, and concerns about economic and social stability. Furthermore, the comparative analysis reveals diverse uses of emotionally charged posts, especially during the 2024 pre-election period, with strategies adapting to each nation’s political reality, thus imparting unique characteristics to each campaign. The findings underscore Instagram’s power in shaping political discourse and electoral behavior, highlighting the need for further study of digital communication in modern democracies.

While most published research on COVID-19 focused on a few countries and especially on the second wave of the pandemic and the vaccination period, we turn to the first wave (March–May 2020) to examine the sentiments and emotions expressed by Twitter users in Greece. Using deep-learning techniques, the analysis reveals a complex interplay of surprise, anger, fear, and sadness. Initially, surprise was dominant, reflecting the shock and uncertainty accompanying the sudden onset of the pandemic. Anger replaced surprise as individuals struggled with isolation and social distancing. Despite these challenges, positive sentiments of hope, resilience and solidarity were also expressed. The COVID-19 pandemic had a strong imprint upon the emotional landscape worldwide and in Greece. This calls for appealing to emotions as well as to reason when crafting effective public health strategies.

Within computational political science, a sentiment expressed in social media has been subject to examination about electoral behaviour, more so because of the cases of the successful use of social media by candidates (Obama) or by companies who tried to manipulate public opinion (e.g., the involvement of the Russian Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica in 2016 Presidential Elections in the USA, or of Cambridge Analytica’s to the UK’s Referendum about Brexit). In this paper we examine a refinement of analysis, moving from sentiment (positive-negative) to emotions, combine opinion mining with social network analysis, and apply it to the tweets posted during the critical elections that took place in Greece in 2015 and 2019. We find support for the relation between some emotions and voting behaviour in other countries but also realize that the intensity of expressing such emotions is perhaps a better indicator of the need for change.