Content area
Abstract
This study seeks to examine how the U.S. Army legitimizes and pursues the expansion of its regime on Instagram. In order to continue to justify its legitimate existence and multidimensional expansion in the forms of increased personnel, funding, and international influence, the U.S. military stresses the significance of controlling its representation to the public. There is a growing body of research on the representations of the Army in recruitment materials, as well as research highlighting the connections between normalization of violence, media, and militaries, and there is a growing body of literature around their intersection with the frontier of social media. Still, not much is known about the self portrayal U.S. military branches on social media platforms, such as Instagram. A focus on how these themes of normalization of violence, media, and militaries manifest in the case of U.S. military branches, particularly on Instagram, is needed to develop a fuller understanding of the mechanisms through which the military is normalizing its violence in new forms of media. The largest branch of the U.S. military, the Army, has an official Instagram page (@usarmy) with 2.9 million followers and over 4,500 posts as of March 2024. To assess how the U.S. Army utilizes social media platforms for regime legitimation and expansion, I analyzed 50 randomly selected Instagram posts in the year 2021 from the Army’s official Instagram page. Through qualitative content analysis, I find that the Army legitimizes its regime on Instagram through normalization of violence and expands its influence by exploiting networks of engagement. Normalization of violence is achieved on Instagram through discussions or omissions of the “adversary” and informal content paired with serious or violent content. The Army also exploits networks of engagement on Instagram by tagging other military affiliated accounts, prolific utilization of hashtags, and encouraging users to engage with content. These significant findings indicate the need for increasing critical attention to be paid to militaries and militarism on social media.
