The Ritual Logic of Attention-Based Politics: Legitimacy, Recognition, and Platformised Participation

Abstract

Attention has become a central resource of contemporary political communication, yet existing accounts do not fully explain how visibility acquires social credibility and political force under platformised conditions. This article addresses that problem through the ritual model of communication and media rituals. It develops a theory-building framework linking attention, recognition, legitimacy, and participation within a platformised ritual circuit. Methodologically, it proceeds through conceptual synthesis and illustrative analytical reconstruction rather than causal testing. It reconstructs three public episode types centred on witnessing, conflict, and commemoration, using public artefacts, trace-based evidence, platform affordances, and reporting. The analysis argues that attention-based politics is a ritualised struggle over socially recognised salience. Visibility becomes politically consequential when publicly ratified through legible participation and when recognition traces are narrativised as claims to legitimacy. The article proposes a provisional comparative vocabulary for distinguishing dominant configurations of online political media rituals across concentrated witnessing, cyclical antagonism, and prolonged commemorative alignment. It concludes that platforms do not simply amplify visibility or host participation. They organise the recurring social forms through which visibility becomes usable in legitimacy claims.

1. Introduction

Attention has become a central concept in contemporary political communication. It is usually conceptualised as a scarce public resource shaped by media systems, audience behaviour, and the architectures through which visibility is distributed (Merkovity, 2017; Webster, 2011, 2016). Scholarship has shown that issue attention circulates across hybrid environments in which citizens, politicians, parties, and legacy media react to and recalibrate one another’s agendas (Barberá et al., 2019; Gilardi et al., 2022). Yet attention cannot be reduced to scarcity or algorithmic sorting. Platformised visibility is also shaped by recognition dynamics, identity claims, and structural asymmetries that advantage some actors, sources, and communication styles over others (González-Bailón et al., 2022; Wells & Friedland, 2023). Recent work also shows that low-credibility content can attract greater attention under specific platform conditions (Biswas et al., 2025; Jungherr & Schroeder, 2023). These perspectives capture important aspects of the contemporary media environment. However, they do not fully explain how attention becomes collectively organised, publicly validated, and repeatedly converted into legitimacy under platform conditions.

This article approaches that problem through the ritual model of communication. In that tradition, communication is not reduced to transmission but understood as a recurrent social process through which shared meanings, social bonds, and a common world are symbolically maintained (Carey, 2009; Rothenbuhler, 2006). This perspective remains productive in the digital environment because platformised communication depends on repeated, publicly legible, and socially patterned acts through which people signal attention, register alignment, and help construct what counts as real. Attention is therefore not simply directed toward pre-existing objects. It is socially accomplished through communicative forms that stabilise relevance, establish boundaries, and orient participation.

The media ritual tradition sharpens this insight by linking ritual practice to power and legitimacy. Rituals organised around media do not simply produce belonging. They also naturalise the idea that media occupy a privileged place from which society appears to itself, making the centre of public life seem visible and legitimate (Couldry, 2003). Under platform conditions, this older myth of media centrality is reworked as platform centrality, with visibility often treated as evidence of relevance (Beer, 2016; Bucher, 2012; Covington et al., 2016). Ritualised participation thus helps authorise messages, actors, and the infrastructural environments through which they circulate.

The problem becomes even more pressing when political communication takes eventful form. The broadcast-era literature on media events showed how live coverage could create collective attention and organise audiences around shared interpretations of historic occasions (Carey, 2002; Dayan & Katz, 1992). That insight still matters, but eventfulness is no longer tied to a single broadcast centre or to spectatorship alone. In platformised environments, events are assembled through reposting, commenting, clipping, hashtagging, reacting, and cross-platform recirculation. Publics may help perform events into being through visible micro-acts that intensify presence, distribute interpretation, and extend symbolic participation (Ural, 2023; Valaskivi et al., 2022). Contemporary political events are better understood as networked ritual configurations in which participation and visibility are intertwined.

This transformation cannot be comprehended without taking infrastructure seriously. Deep mediatisation and platformisation have reorganised the material and institutional conditions of ritualised communication. Ranking systems, recommender architectures, metric displays, reaction buttons, datafication, and platform governance shape the rhythms, visibility hierarchies, and participation formats through which collective attention is organised (Cui, 2019; Hepp, 2019; van Dijck, 2020). The issue is not only that media is embedded in culture, but that infrastructures actively pattern the forms through which belonging, witnessing, conflict, and recognition become publicly legible. Platformised communication does not replace ritual. It reformats it through architectures of selection, circulation, and measurable response.

Recent scholarship on social media rituals and affective publics strengthens this argument by showing that digital participation often operates through repetitive, typified, and value-laden forms rather than through information exchange alone. Routine platform gestures, such as liking, reposting, commenting, tagging, and sharing, do not merely register engagement. They may function as ritualised gestures when they externalise recognition, make alignment visible, and help publics become legible to themselves (Trillò et al., 2022; Ural, 2023). These gestures matter politically because they generate auditable traces that can later be cited in claims about support, authenticity, solidarity, grievance, or moral rightness. Recognition, in other words, is not an aftereffect of political communication. It is one of the main mechanisms through which visibility becomes socially usable and politically consequential.

This positioning clarifies how the framework relates to adjacent accounts of digital politics. Connective action explains digitally coordinated personalised participation (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Affective publics scholarship shows how networked publics take shape through emotional expression, storytelling, and mediated attachment (Papacharissi, 2015). Platform power approaches explain how infrastructures, metrics, governance, and datafied visibility shape public communication (van Dijck et al., 2018; van Dijck, 2020). The ritual circuit does not replace these accounts. It specifies how visible participation becomes recognition, how recognition becomes available as a trace, and how such traces can be narrated as claims to legitimacy. Its contribution lies in connecting participation, affect, infrastructure, and legitimacy within one ritual sequence.

This article argues that attention-based politics is best understood as a ritualised struggle over socially recognised salience. Visibility becomes politically consequential when it is converted into recognition through publicly legible participation and when recognition traces are narrativised as claims to legitimacy. The article makes three contributions. It reconnects attention-based politics to the ritual tradition, develops a ritual circuit linking attention, recognition, legitimacy, and participation, and proposes a provisional comparative vocabulary for analysing online political media rituals across liveness, conflict, and commemoration. The broader aim is to show how platforms organise public visibility and how legitimacy is enacted and contested in digital political communication.

The sections that follow develop the ritual logic of attention and specify the conceptual architecture of the framework. Rather than offering a representative empirical test, the article then turns to three brief analytical reconstructions of publicly familiar episodes to clarify how the proposed mechanism becomes legible under different political and affective conditions. These episodes are not treated as a globally representative sample of platformised politics. They are used as analytically useful, highly visible, and well-documented cases that circulated within Western or Western-facing media environments, and this necessarily limits the universal scope of the illustrative material. The value of the selection lies instead in analytic variation, since the three episodes foreground different temporalities, affective structures, and modes of participation through which attention, recognition, and legitimacy become publicly connected.

2. The Ritual Logic of Attention

Attention-based politics is usually understood as a struggle over socially recognised salience rather than as a simple competition for scarce cognitive resources. What becomes worthy of attention is produced through communicative forms that define situations, assign stakes, and orient publics toward particular actors, claims, and conflicts (Merkovity, 2017). If communication is approached as a ritual process through which a shared world is maintained rather than described, attention appears less as an individual disposition than as a socially organised accomplishment (Carey, 2009). Under platform conditions, this becomes visible because attention is externalised through publicly legible traces of participation, especially where networked publics transform visibility into sustained political attention (Tufekci, 2013). Yet not every repeated platform gesture should be treated as ritual. A like, repost, comment, hashtag, or visual marker becomes analytically relevant as ritualised participation only when it is folded into a recognisable sequence of public orientation. Such gestures acquire ritual force when they are repeated in socially legible form, attached to shared values, used to mark boundaries, and experienced as part of a wider scene of collective attention. The ritual quality lies not in the technical affordance itself but in the relation between symbolic form, public repetition, value display, and collective recognition.

A ritual perspective sharpens this problem by shifting the analytical focus from exposure to ratification. Political communication becomes consequential when the publics do not simply encounter messages but participate in making their relevance socially legible. This insight remains productive in digital settings because platformised communication similarly organises the conditions under which public importance is seen, measured, and taken for granted. What earlier appeared as media centrality is now often recoded as platform centrality, while visibility on platforms is widely treated as evidence of relevance. In this setting, metrics seem to condense diffuse forms of judgment into a seemingly objective sign of value. In this respect, the platform does not simply distribute attention. It also helps authorise what counts as socially present and politically real within the broader dynamics of deep mediatisation and mediated reality construction (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Hepp, 2019).

This is why the language of the attention economy, although useful, remains incomplete on its own. Scarcity, competition, and algorithmic amplification explain only part of the process. A ritual account makes it possible to see how attention is organised into patterned forms of public orientation. Ordinary acts such as liking, reposting, commenting, tagging, and sharing do not automatically amount to ritual. They become ritualised when they are organised into recognisable patterns of public response through which participants express alignment, display value commitments, and stabilise shared meanings in socially observable ways (Trillò et al., 2022). From another angle, affective alignment in networked settings can also be understood through ritual temporality, performativity, and liminality, which together show that collective feeling is not incidental to mediated publics but structurally embedded in them (Ural, 2023). Attention, then, is not simply captured. It is ritualised into observable patterns through which publics become legible to themselves, and through which claims to relevance acquire social durability.

2.1. Recognition as Ritual Currency

If attention marks salience, recognition is the mechanism through which salience becomes publicly usable. It converts visibility into value by affirming that a performance, claim, or actor deserves acknowledgment within a shared field of observation. On platforms, this conversion may be enacted through repeatable gestures such as liking, reposting, following, commenting, or remixing when these become publicly legible signs of acknowledgement, alignment, or contestation. Their importance lies in standardisation and visibility, as they make participation socially recognisable and cumulatively consequential. Recognition functions as a ritual currency whose force lies in repetition, circulation, and public legibility.

Recognition also helps define for whom something matters and under what terms. Visible acts of support, repetition, defence, or denunciation contribute to the constitution of an interpretive community. Hence, recognition is inseparable from boundary work, since it marks insiders and outsiders, proper and improper responses, and legitimate and illegitimate participants. The public is not simply addressed by political communication. It is formed through recurrent acts of acknowledgment and differentiation. This extends the dramaturgical insight that public life depends on impression management, because platform settings make audience response part of the visible scene (Goffman, 1959). Authenticity is therefore better understood as the provisional outcome of repeated public ratification than as a stable personal property.

Ritual theory and platform analysis meet most clearly when recognition becomes measurable. Likes, shares, views, and comment counts seem to record audience response, but they also naturalise the idea that quantified visibility is a proxy for public relevance. The myth of the mediated centre may be translated into platform terms: platform visibility appears to reveal what society has already validated (Couldry, 2003). This is inseparable from a platform logic in which public values, infrastructures, and metrics are deeply entangled (van Dijck et al., 2018). Recognition matters politically because it turns visibility into a trace that can later be cited in claims about authenticity, support, grievance, solidarity, or moral rightness.

2.2. Legitimacy Under Platformised Participation

Legitimacy in this framework is not treated as a purely institutional attribute that actors either possess or lack before communication begins. It is approached instead as an emergent effect of ritualised recognition. Platformised participation matters because it provides routinised pathways through which recognition becomes visible, comparable, and politically actionable. Political actors do not simply seek attention in the abstract. They seek forms of attention that can later be narrated as signs that they stand for something socially recognised and publicly warranted. This helps explain why platform-native political performances are so often brief, emotionally legible, visually condensed, and easy to circulate (Altheide, 2020). Their form is shaped in advance by the expectation that they will be taken up, repeated, and transformed into signs of wider assent.

This process also requires taking infrastructures seriously. Communicative practice is increasingly organised through datafication, connectivity, automated selection, and interface design. Under deep mediatisation, such infrastructures shape social rhythms, hierarchies, and forms of visibility (Hepp, 2019). Platform infrastructures structure the pace at which recognition accumulates, the formats through which it becomes legible, and the terms on which some performances appear more central than others. Legitimacy is distributed, co-produced by performers, audiences, and infrastructures that shape what can appear credible, resonant, and widely supported.

A ritual perspective adds a further claim. The main outcome of these interactions is not engagement alone, but the stabilisation of shareable value claims. Once recognition becomes visible and repetitive, it can be strategically narrated as if it were evidence of public backing, common sense, or direct alignment between a leader and a collectivity. This is why platformised legitimacy often appears auditable, even when the traces on which it rests remain partial, contested, or concentrated within particular publics (Merkovity, 2019). It leaves traces, and those traces can be circulated and reinterpreted as signs that support claims to mandate, authenticity, protective capacity, or moral authority. The process remains unstable, however, because recognition is not always affirmative. Conflict can intensify legitimacy claims rather than simply undermine them. Hostile attention, mockery, and denunciation may work normatively against a claim while still reinforcing it performatively by sustaining its circulation and keeping it close to the centre of public notice.

2.3. The Ritual Circuit of Attention-Based Politics

The argument can now be summarised as a ritual circuit linking attention, recognition, legitimacy, and participation as seen in Figure 1. The circuit begins when a political performance frames a situation as urgent, morally charged, and publicly consequential. That performance is then formatted in platform-legible ways through simplification, emotional cueing, symbolic condensation, and repeatable signs that invite uptake. Recognition follows when audiences respond through visible gestures of support, opposition, witnessing, or continued engagement. These gestures do not end the process. They create traces that can be narrativised as claims of authenticity, support, grievance, victimhood, solidarity, or moral rightness. Participation then becomes routinised as similar formats and similar recognition patterns are repeated across episodes and recirculated through platform infrastructures.

The value of this circuit lies in connecting symbolic performance with infrastructural selection without reducing one to the other. Attention-based politics cannot be explained by strategic communication or algorithmic amplification alone. Political performances gain force when they become recognisable as ritual forms, generate auditable traces of participation, and allow those traces to be translated into legitimacy claims that travel across episodes (Couldry, 2003; Hepp, 2019). Eventfulness, therefore, does not disappear under platform conditions. It becomes more distributed, participatory, and dependent on visible micro-acts of witnessing and circulation (Frosh & Pinchevski, 2018; Ural, 2023; Valaskivi et al., 2022). Platformised participation is one arena in which legitimacy is enacted, contested, and renewed (van Dijck, 2020).

3. Analytical Strategy of the Framework

This article is a theory-building intervention. Its purpose is not to test causal effects, estimate prevalence, or provide a comprehensive inventory of all platform rituals, but to develop an analytically portable framework for examining how attention is converted into recognition, legitimacy, and renewed participation in attention-based politics. The argument proceeds through conceptual synthesis, analytical reconstruction, and typology-oriented abstraction. Its ambition is deliberately limited. The article does not seek representativeness. It seeks to render the proposed ritual circuit intelligible, analytically portable, and comparatively useful across different manifestations of platformised political communication.

The framework applies most directly to platformised political communication in which acts of participation become publicly visible, repeatable, and available for recirculation. It is not a claim about all digital media use, nor about all social media platforms in the same way. Its primary object is the hybrid environment in which political performances move across social media platforms, news media, screenshots, clips, hashtags, comment threads, metrics, and cross-platform narratives. The relevant platform condition is not the presence of a single technological system, but the public legibility of participation and the capacity of such participation to leave traces that can be reused in legitimacy claims.

The conceptual component brings together work on ritual communication, media rituals, media events, deep mediatisation, and platformised participation. The analytical component is illustrative rather than evidentiary in any strong empirical sense. Its role is to clarify how the proposed mechanism can be reconstructed across different kinds of publicly visible political episodes. The typological component then abstracts from these reconstructions in a deliberately provisional manner.

3.1. Illustrative Episode Families

The illustrative material was selected to maximise analytic variation rather than empirical breadth. Instead of centring the design on particular leaders, countries, or platforms, the article focuses on ritual episodes that make different parts of the circuit visible. The first family consists of platformised liveness and witnessing episodes, such as crisis communication moments, live interventions, and rapidly circulating clips. These condense attention in time and make public witnessing unusually visible. The second family consists of conflict-centred episodes such as scandal cycles, ritualised denunciation, quote-post confrontation, and public shaming. These show that recognition need not be affirmative to remain politically consequential. The third family consists of commemorative and solidarity-centred episodes, including mourning, memorial posting, symbolic profile practices, and hashtag-based collective alignment. These are useful for tracing how participation stabilises shared values and moral orientation in publicly legible form (Trillò et al., 2022; Ural, 2023). Selecting from these families allows the mechanism to travel across different temporalities, affective structures, and forms of participation.

The three illustrative episodes were thus selected for analytic variation rather than for geographical, platform-specific, or political-system representativeness. They are highly visible, well-documented, and publicly familiar episodes in which different parts of the ritual circuit can be reconstructed with particular clarity. This selection also has a clear limitation. The cases circulated primarily within Western or Western-facing media environments, and the framework should not be read as already validated across all political systems, regions, or platform cultures. Its wider applicability remains a task for future comparative research, especially in non-Western, authoritarian, semi-authoritarian, and differently platformised media environments.

3.2. Ritual Episodes as Analytical Probes

The unit of analysis is the ritual episode. A ritual episode is understood here as a bounded communicative sequence in which a political performance becomes publicly salient, is formatted in platform-legible ways, attracts visible recognition, and generates or contests legitimacy claims that can feed into further participation. The framework does not define such episodes through a numerical threshold of likes, shares, comments, views, or hashtag volume. Such thresholds would be misleading in a conceptual study because visibility metrics vary across platforms, political contexts, and time. The threshold is instead analytical. A sequence becomes relevant as a ritual episode when four conditions are present: a political performance or symbolic cue is framed as publicly consequential; participation becomes visible through repeated and socially legible gestures; these gestures produce traces that can be cited, contested, or recirculated; and those traces become available for claims about authenticity, support, grievance, solidarity, moral authority, or legitimacy.

The episode begins when a performance, event, or symbolic cue organises collective orientation. It develops as audiences respond through visible gestures such as commenting, reposting, repeating slogans, using hashtags, endorsing, mocking, or defending. It reaches its analytical peak when these traces are narrativised as claims about authenticity, support, victimhood, protective authority, moral correctness, or public relevance, and ends when attention weakens, or a new object of collective focus displaces it. This keeps the focus on process rather than on isolated posts, leaders, or platforms, while holding together symbolic performance, infrastructural mediation, and audience participation within one analytical frame (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Hepp, 2019).

Analysis proceeds through qualitative process reconstruction. The purpose is not to count interactions but to follow how the ritual circuit operates within each episode. In practice, the reconstruction is organised around five connected questions. First, what initiates performance or symbolic cue frames the situation as publicly consequential? Second, how is the episode formatted through platform visibility logics and affordances? Third, through which micro-rituals do audiences turn reception into visible participation? Fourth, how are these traces translated into claims about authenticity, support, grievance, solidarity, moral authority, or legitimacy? Fifth, does the episode remain isolated, or does it feed back into later participation through repetition, recirculation, and reuse of recognition traces? The questions are connected because the article does not treat performance, platform formatting, audience uptake, legitimacy narration, and feedback as separate variables. It treats them as moments in a single ritual sequence. This procedure keeps the analysis close to observable communicative practice while still allowing comparison across episode families.

3.3. Scope Conditions and Limits of the Framework

Because the empirical material is illustrative, two safeguards are necessary. The first is sensitivity to unsuccessful or unstable episodes. The analysis pays attention not only to cases in which visibility is successfully converted into legitimacy, but also to cases in which recognition remains fragile, produces ridicule, or intensifies participation without stabilising authority. Such breakdowns reveal where the circuit fails or where repair work becomes necessary.

The second safeguard is cross-episode comparison. Claims about the mechanism are retained only when they remain intelligible across different episode families, rather than depending on a single leader, platform, or political context. This comparative discipline is important because it prevents the argument from collapsing into case description while preserving the modesty appropriate to a theory-building design.

The framework has clear limits. It cannot support prevalence claims, estimate effects, or speak for all platforms and political systems. Its strength lies in offering a mechanism, a portable interpretive sequence, and a conditional comparative vocabulary that later work can operationalise through comparative sampling, mixed methods, or larger-scale trace analysis. What follows is not a catalogue of cases or an empirical test of the model. It is a set of analytical reconstructions that make the sequence of attention, recognition, legitimacy, participation, and renewed attention conceptually visible. Questions of prevalence, causal strength, and measurable effects require a different research design.

4. Analytical Demonstrations of the Framework

This section turns from conceptual specification to analytical reconstruction. It examines three widely documented ritual episodes through which different parts of the proposed circuit become visible. The reconstructions draw on publicly accessible artefacts, early recirculation, platform-specific affordances, contemporaneous reporting, and scholarship. The analysis follows the five questions specified above, although not in a rigid checklist format. Each reconstruction identifies the initiating performance, platform-specific formatting, audience uptake, legitimacy claims, and feedback through which the episode extends, returns, or becomes reusable. The three episodes were chosen because each clarifies a distinct aspect of the framework (see Figure 2): witnessing and protective presence, conflict and adversarial recognition, and mourning, solidarity, and moral alignment. Read together, they demonstrate the framework’s interpretive reach without verifying it in a strong empirical sense.

The first episode is Volodymyr Zelensky’s Kyiv selfie video of 25 February 2022, posted with the message “We are here. We are in Kyiv. We defend Ukraine” (zelenskyy_official, 2022). The second is Donald Trump’s Fulton County mugshot episode on 24 August 2023, when the booking image was immediately recirculated on X together with a fundraising appeal (Coster & Dang, 2023). The third is the George Floyd protest wave of May and June 2020, specifically the hashtag-centred circulation of #BlackLivesMatter and #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd (Anderson et al., 2020; Chang et al., 2022). These episodes are not treated as representative samples. They are used as analytically distinct ritual episodes through which the same five-part sequence can be reconstructed under different affective and political conditions.

4.1. Recognition and the Public Ratification of Visibility

In platform environments, visibility becomes politically consequential only when it is publicly confirmed. Recognition matters because repeatable acts such as reposting, clipping, endorsing, mocking, or defending turn exposure into a socially legible fact. The issue is not visibility alone, but the conversion of visibility into a form of validation that can later be reused in political narratives (Couldry, 2003; Ural, 2023).

The Zelensky episode makes this mechanism clear. The communicative force of the Kyiv selfie video came from radical condensation. It did not present a long policy statement, but a short, mobile-phone scene of bodily co-presence. Zelensky and senior Ukrainian leaders appeared together in Kyiv, facing the camera and repeating a simple claim of presence: “We are here. We are in Kyiv. We defend Ukraine” (zelenskyy_official, 2022). The initiating performance answered rumours of absence or flight by making its presence itself visible. Instagram allowed the scene to circulate as a compact visual artefact in which handheld immediacy, bodily presence, direct address, and cross-platform shareability could be read together. Political leadership was reduced to co-presence, bodily proximity, and composure in the face of threat (Hallgren, 2025). In such settings, authenticity is not secured by institutional office alone. It is produced through visible forms of ratification that confirm the speaker’s presence and the public’s willingness to treat that presence as credible (Enli, 2015; Goffman, 1986). The low-production aesthetics of the video helped reframe authority as proximity.

What followed were recognisable micro-rituals of uptake. Reposting, clipping, short affirmations, visual recirculation, and cross-platform repetition translated reception into public confirmation. Each act was minor in isolation, yet their accumulation created a visible record of endorsement that could later support claims of resolve, representativeness, and protective capacity (Frosh & Pinchevski, 2018). Recognition here worked as a social relay, stabilising the performance as an accepted reference point of the wider event.

The Trump mugshot episode exposed the same logic in a more conflictual form. The booking image did not acquire force because it carried one settled meaning. Its initiating cue was a legally produced image from the Fulton County booking process. However, its political force emerged when that image was immediately reinserted into campaign communication, X-based recirculation, fundraising, and merchandise. Trump’s return to X, with the mugshot and a donation appeal, turned the booking photograph into a platform-ready object of recognition rather than merely a legal document (Coster & Dang, 2023). The platform-specific form mattered differently here than in the Zelensky episode. X made the image available for rapid reposting, quotation, screenshotting, captioning, denunciation, and counter-denunciation, while the donation link connected symbolic uptake to campaign infrastructure. The episode, therefore, depended on a platform environment in which adversarial circulation is not external to political meaning, but one of the ways in which political meaning is repeatedly produced. Reuters also reported that the image was rapidly transformed into T-shirts, mugs, posters, shot glasses, and other commercial objects by both friends and foes, which shows how the image moved from legal exposure into a wider field of symbolic circulation (Slattery et al., 2023). For supporters, the image could be reframed as proof of persecution, endurance, and anti-establishment authenticity. For opponents, it circulated as an icon of disgrace and overdue accountability. Yet the divergence of interpretations did not interrupt the mechanism. It intensified it. Once the image became a focal object of repetition, parody, denunciation, defence, fundraising, and merchandise, it was inserted into a dense field of visible recognition in which stance itself became publicly legible.

This does not mean that the episode proved broad public backing for Trump. It shows something more specific and more limited. Recognition traces can support legitimacy claims even when they are unevenly distributed across publics. If only supporters had circulated the mugshot as a sign of persecution, the episode would still have produced a claim to persecuted authenticity. However, it would not have demonstrated collective endorsement beyond the public. The participation of opponents changed the configuration. Their denunciations, parodies, and condemnations did not validate Trump’s preferred meaning, yet they helped keep the image visible, repeatable, and politically usable. The episode illustrates why the framework treats recognition as contested and narratable rather than as direct evidence of consensus. Supportive recognition stabilised a legitimacy claim inside the political camp, while hostile recognition contributed to the image’s symbolic centrality across the wider public field.

Recognition in platform politics cannot be reduced to approval. Hostile repetition can preserve centrality, but differently from supportive uptake. A claim or image may be normatively challenged while being performatively reinforced through circulation. The political effect of the mugshot episode lay less in persuasion than in converting legal exposure into renewed symbolic centrality. Public attention did not settle the image’s meaning. It kept the image at the centre of notice and preserved its political usability (Papacharissi, 2015; Pauha, 2024). These two episodes suggest that validation becomes more durable when visibility is folded into repeatable social gestures, while also showing that such validation may remain partial, adversarial, and internally differentiated.

4.2. Boundary Work, Value Alignment, and Moral Differentiation

If micro-rituals of recognition stabilise visibility, they also help constitute publics. Platformised participation does not first gather people into communities through deliberation. More often, it assembles them through repeated symbolic cues, visible gestures of alignment, and shared understandings of what kind of response a situation requires. Community formation depends on both value construction and boundary work. Publics become legible to themselves by affirming what matters and by distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of participation (Couldry, 2003; van Dijck et al., 2018).

The George Floyd protest wave revealed this process with intensity. Pew Research Center’s analysis of public tweets found that #BlackLivesMatter was used roughly 47.8 million times between 26 May and 7 June 2020, while another study analysed 1.13 million public Instagram posts connected to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests (Anderson et al., 2020; Chang et al., 2022). These figures are not used to estimate effects, but to indicate the scale and public legibility of the traces through which the episode becomes available for ritual analysis. Its platform-specific form was distributed rather than centred on one artefact. Twitter made alignment searchable and temporally concentrated through hashtagging. Instagram made solidarity visual through images, black squares, protest photographs, and profile-based signs of affiliation. Cross-platform circulation connected these forms into a wider moral scene in which grief, outrage, and demands for justice could be repeated in mutually recognisable formats. Hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter and #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd then worked as more than topical markers. They functioned as ceremonial signs of presence within a shared moral scene and helped transform dispersed reactions into collective alignment (Burgess et al., 2018; Tikka, 2019). The public did not simply witness the event. It participated in constructing it as a scene of grief, outrage, and claims of justice (Pardes, 2020).

Such rituals also produce internal distinctions. Once participation becomes visible, it becomes contestable. The protest wave generated not only solidarity but also disputes over what counted as adequate solidarity. Highly visible gestures could be embraced, questioned, or rejected depending on whether they clarified or diluted collective purpose. This is a central point for a ritual reading of platform politics. Participation is never only inclusion. It also involves the policing of forms, tones, and symbols through which belonging is expressed. Boundary work is internal to the ritual process, not an external correction applied afterward (Hatfield, 2024; Kirby & Özkula, 2023).

The mugshot episode reproduced the same structure in reverse. There, community formation did not revolve around mourning or justice but around grievance and antagonistic solidarity. The image became a boundary object through which opposing camps publicly located themselves. Supporters treated it as proof of institutional overreach. Opponents read it as a sign that impunity had finally been interrupted. In both cases, visible participation sharpened distinctions between insiders and outsiders, between proper and improper interpretation, and between legitimate and illegitimate authority (Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Brubaker, 2017). The ritual force of the episode came from the fact that users were repeatedly invited to declare a position through gestures that were easy to reproduce and easy to see.

Community building in platformised politics is better understood as moral differentiation than as the spontaneous emergence of a unified public. Shared values are stabilised through visible repetition, while collective identity is sharpened through exclusion, correction, and symbolic demarcation. Fragmented participation can still yield a patterned public field because feeds, comment threads, repost chains, and image recirculations are often organised by scripts of alignment that tell participants who belongs, what matters, and how recognition should be displayed (Krzyżanowski, 2020; Zerubavel, 1991). Platform rituals build publics by making values and boundaries observable simultaneously.

4.3. Emotion Management and Affective Durability

The durability of attention depends not just on recognition and boundary work, but also on affective organisation. Political episodes persist when emotion is formatted for collective uptake and repeated display. Platformised publics do not simply encounter emotional content. They are invited to perform emotion through standardised, visible, and socially interpretable gestures. This makes affect central to the ritual logic of attention, because emotional alignment helps transform episodic visibility into sustained public relevance (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Ural, 2023).

The Zelensky episode organised fear into disciplined defiance. Its affective power rested on the compression of vulnerability and steadiness into one scene. That balance mattered because authority under crisis is stabilised when audiences recognise not only danger, but also a socially acceptable emotional orientation toward it. The video offered a form through which anxiety could be converted into protective confidence. What circulated was not information alone, but a usable emotional script that the public could adopt, repeat, and validate (Edelman, 1988).

The George Floyd protest wave followed a different affective course. Grief, outrage, and solidarity were organised into witnessing, naming, memorialising, and demanding redress. Twitter hashtagging, Instagram visual posting, and the circulation of memorial and protest symbols made emotion publicly repeatable across platforms (Anderson et al., 2020; Chang et al., 2022). Emotion acquired public force because it circulated through recognisable forms, allowing dispersed users to participate in a shared affective scene (Tikka, 2019). Commemorative and solidarity-centred episodes do not simply express pre-existing values. They help restore violated values by making grief publicly visible and morally directional. Research on digital commemoration shows how such rituals can move from mourning to judgement, binding memory to claims about injustice, responsibility, and collective obligation (Hatfield, 2024). Attention is prolonged through repeated affective alignment.

The mugshot episode can again function as a more adversarial emotional structure. Its affective core was grievance, resentment, and the excitement of defiant recognition. Supporters were encouraged to interpret the image. Opponents framed the same image through disgrace and accountability. In both cases, high-arousal participation kept the episode active by rewarding rapid stance-taking and repeated symbolic investment. Under platform conditions, such emotionally charged circulation is remarkably scalable because iconic images and compact moral frames are easy to repost, caption, and embed into broader narratives of belonging or threat (Pauha, 2024; Yeung, 2018). The episode illustrates how antagonistic emotion can stabilise public centrality even in the absence of normative consensus.

Across the three cases, emotion management appears as a mechanism of temporal durability. Fear is converted into protective authority, grief into solidaristic witnessing, and grievance into loyal identification. Affect becomes politically consequential when it is publicly formatted, socially endorsed, and repeatedly circulated, and when symbolic form, public recognition, and affective alignment reinforce one another (Collins, 2005; Edelman, 1988).

5. Toward a Comparative Vocabulary of Online Political Media Rituals

The three reconstructions generate a provisional comparative vocabulary for online political media rituals.

Table 1. A provisional comparative vocabulary of online political media rituals.

Illustrative Episode	Ritual Configuration	Temporal Form	Dominant Participation Mode	Dominant Legitimacy Mode	Main Ritual Effect
Zelensky’s Kyiv selfie video	Concentrated witnessing	Concentrated	Witnessing and protective co-presence	Protective legitimacy	Protective authority ratified through shared witnessing
Trump’s Fulton County mugshot	Cyclical antagonism	Cyclical	Antagonistic alignment and adversarial recirculation	Persecuted authenticity	Symbolic centrality renewed through adversarial recirculation
George Floyd protest wave	Prolonged commemorative alignment	Prolonged	Commemorative alignment and moral witnessing	Moral restoration	Moral claims stabilised through commemorative witnessing

summarises this vocabulary across three dimensions: temporal form, participation mode, and legitimacy mode. The table should not be read as an exhaustive typology or as a classification of mutually exclusive ritual forms. It identifies recurrent configurations through which platformised episodes may convert visibility into recognisable claims to legitimacy.

Table 1 should be read as a mapping device rather than a fixed taxonomy. Read comparatively, the cases suggest that online political media rituals differ not simply by topic, but by the temporal structuring of participation and by the form of legitimacy that recirculation may stabilise. In the present reconstruction, Zelensky condenses witnessing into protective legitimacy, Trump converts antagonistic circulation into persecuted authenticity, and the George Floyd episode sustains commemorative alignment as moral restoration. The vocabulary also makes partial failure and hybridisation visible. Not every attention-generating episode becomes a successful media ritual in the sense used here. A sequence may produce visibility without durable recognition, recognition only inside a narrow public, or circulation through ridicule that sustains attention while weakening intended authority. Episodes may also combine configurations. A commemorative sequence can become antagonistic when disputes over proper solidarity dominate, concentrated witnessing can later return as cyclical conflict, and conflict-centred episodes can acquire commemorative features in later grievance narratives. The vocabulary should therefore be treated as a heuristic tool for identifying dominant configurations, not as a claim that online political media rituals are pure, stable, or mutually exclusive forms.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

In platformised political communication, visibility matters politically when it is ratified through recognisable participation and translated into legitimacy claims that travel beyond the originating episode. A ritual perspective makes this process more tractable by shifting attention from exposure to the patterned social work through which publics acknowledge, circulate, and normatively weigh what appears before them (Carey, 2009; Couldry, 2003). The three-episode families clarify different dominant configurations of the same mechanism. Witnessing-centred episodes stabilise protective legitimacy through co-presence, conflict-centred episodes show how antagonistic uptake may preserve symbolic centrality, and commemorative episodes reveal how repeated alignment and moral witnessing turn attention into claims about justice and obligation. What varies is the temporal organisation of participation, the legibility of recognition, and the legitimacy claim that recirculation helps stabilise (Hatfield, 2024; Ural, 2023).

This argument also has implications for media events. The point is not to abandon the concept, but to reformulate it. The original account remains indispensable because it identified how mediated occasions suspend routine, gather attention, and organise collective interpretation (Dayan & Katz, 1992). Yet the cases discussed here indicate that eventfulness no longer depends on a singular broadcast centre or bounded live transmission. Under platform conditions, events are assembled across interfaces, rhythms, and forms of participation. Witnessing can be prolonged through recirculated clips, conflict can return in waves of commentary and denunciation, and commemorative episodes can extend salience through alignment and memory work (Cui, 2019). It is more precise to speak of networked ritual configurations than of discrete broadcast events.

A further implication concerns platform governance and the democratic problem of legitimacy. If legitimacy is increasingly shaped by visible traces of recognition, then governance cannot be reduced to removing harmful content or enforcing explicit rules. It also operates through ranking systems, recommendation architectures, metric displays, interface cues, and participation formats that shape what becomes noticeable, repeatable, and seemingly backed by publics (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Gillespie, 2018). This does not mean that platforms determine meaning. The mechanism reconstructed here is distributed across performers, publics, and infrastructures. Yet public values are increasingly negotiated in environments where visibility is privately structured, unevenly distributed, and only partly transparent. Beyond the circulation of political content, platform governance affects the ritual conditions under which recognition becomes publicly credible.

The democratic problem is particularly clear in the case of auditable legitimacy. Platform metrics and visible participation traces appear to make public response observable. They give political actors, journalists, supporters, opponents, and platforms something to point to when claiming that an actor is widely supported, morally vindicated, unfairly persecuted, publicly condemned, or historically significant. Yet such traces are partial and may be shaped by design, strategic mobilisation, uneven visibility, hostile recirculation, or participation concentrated inside particular publics. The danger is not simply that metrics distort public opinion. It is that measurable visibility becomes rhetorically usable as if it were public legitimacy.

This clarifies the ambivalence of platform rituals. They may enable solidarity, recognition, collective mobilisation, and the public articulation of violated values, as the George Floyd protest wave illustrates. At the same time, they may secure exclusion, stigma, antagonistic loyalty, and moralised polarisation, as the Trump mugshot episode shows. Platform rituals should not be treated as either democratising or manipulative in themselves. Their significance depends on how recognition is organised, how participation becomes visible, and how traces of attention are converted into legitimacy claims under infrastructural conditions that are themselves politically consequential (Suchman, 1995).

The article’s contribution is threefold. It reconnects attention-based politics to the ritual model of communication, specifies a portable mechanism linking attention, recognition, legitimacy, and participation, and offers a conditional comparative vocabulary for distinguishing dominant configurations of online political media rituals. The claim is not that this vocabulary exhausts platform politics. It is that platforms do not make political relevance consequential simply by amplifying visibility or hosting participation. They organise the recurrent social forms through which visibility is recognised, narrated, and made usable in legitimacy claims. Ritual is therefore not a residual metaphor in digital politics, but one of its clearest explanatory languages.