Creative intelligence in political visuals: a semiotic study of Facebook content in Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya

Abstract

Social media visuals increasingly structure political communication in Sri Lanka, especially during and after the 2022 people’s protest movement (Aragalaya) which used visual and digital media to express dissent and solidarity. Despite their reach, there is still limited understanding of how creative intelligence operates within political visuals to steer interpretation and action. Using a semiotic approach grounded in Saussure’s dyadic model, Peirce’s triadic model, and Barthes’s denotation/connotation and myth framework, this study analyzes highly engaged Facebook posters, memes, and photographs from the protest period. The findings include that the visuals function as creative-intelligence devices: they simplify complexity through color, scale, montage, and typography and mobilize and coordinate publics, stage resistance to power and shape collective identities by binding personal pain to shared symbols. By revealing how design choices encode ideology and guide decoding across audiences, the study clarifies the ethical and political stakes of visual communication in Sri Lanka’s digital sphere, advancing accounts of democratic participation, political agency, and meaning making through design, memory, and imagination.