ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the role played by image-based user-generated content in perpetrating gendered disinformation and sexist stereotypes. Drawing on widespread misogyny and societal stereotypes, gendered and sexualised disinformation frames women as inherently unfit to participate in the democratic process. In particular, a growing number of disinformation campaigns target women in politics (WIP), spreading false, inaccurate, or misleading gendered and sexualised narratives against them. The chapter also illustrates two overarching and highly recurrent strategies, namely, image manipulation and false identity attribution, characterised by the use of visual affordances to restate, sustain and propagate disinformation and sexist stereotypes against WIP on social media platforms. One of the most important semiotic resources of the fake identity attribution strategy is the caption and its interplay with the image: the caption, in fact, is intended to persuade social media users that the subject in the picture is actually the WIP being targeted.
