Sonia Madrid Cánovas is a Tenured Professor of General Linguistics in the Department of Spanish Language and General Linguistics at the University of Murcia.
In the film Le otto montagne, based on the work of the same name by Paolo Cognetti, the mountain character, the one who could not study – but enjoys reading – shares with his city friend a truth revealed by books: “Povere parole, poveri pensieri.” Poor discourse, lacking nuance and the right words, is a sign of poor thinking. That thinking, however poor, still belongs to the individual. But what happens when poor thinking—if not outright fake—comes from others and is repeated constantly, turning into a slogan that we internalize without reflection?
- The slogan: definition, function and digital rise
Today, the term slogan is hardly used in social communication. In advertising, anglicisms such as claim, tagline, or endline are preferred; in politics, people speak of key messages or catchy phrases. This terminological shift reflects the negative connotations of the word slogan itself (from the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm, “battle cry”), to which the digital ecosystem has given a second life.
A slogan is an intuitive creation that compresses meaning enormously, almost like a black hole. Its strength depends less on grammatical structure than on its semantic autonomy, since it functions as a complete unit of meaning. For this reason, it can be considered a textual entity in its own right, designed to be repeated and easily fixed in collective memory.
According to Olivier Reboul, a slogan “is a thought that stops thought,” because it reduces the need to reflect and delegates that task to a closed, ready-made formula. It not only communicates an idea but invites acceptance without questioning, providing the receiver with intellectual comfort: the pleasure of letting someone else think for you.
The apparent simplicity of slogans conceals significant persuasive and identity-building power: just a few words can influence beliefs, decisions, and behaviors. Their strength in the digital environment stems from the need for brevity, the gradual decline in attention spans, and their ability to impose simplified interpretive frameworks.
2. Social media: the degraded democratic promise
There was a time when new forms of communication and emerging digital channels were seen as progress toward a more democratic society. Ideas such as collective intelligence or online communities celebrated platforms like Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. It was argued that social media could help governments to better relate with citizens and encourage participation.
However, in the mid-2000s when social networks replaced 1990s forums and discussion groups, the noise and disorder on the internet increased significantly due both to the platforms’ design—based on loosely structured interfaces—and to a sociopolitical context marked by a widespread crisis within representative democracies. This crisis affected both political representation systems and public trust in parties and leaders, exacerbated by misinformation and social polarization, phenomena grouped under the concept of civic disengagement.
The negative impact of Twitter (now X) on political debate has intensified since its acquisition by Elon Musk in October 2022. Since then, the platform has strengthened its role in spreading false information and increasing polarization—even questioning institutional representation—by favoring superficial debates and excessive simplification of political issues. Its design promotes slogan-like messages and prioritizes highly interactive content, which often gives visibility to extreme or sensationalist messages, thereby deepening social and political divisions and fueling fake news and conspiracy theories. This ecosystem of X, “the world’s largest megaphone”, seems to operate particularly, though not exclusively, in the service of the far right, and coexists with other digital environments (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube) of more or less impact depending on age, profession, nationality, and other factors. If we carry out a quick linguistic analysis of these social media sites, we will quickly notice a notable linguistic phenomenon: the constant sloganization of politicians, political parties, and even governments. Governing by way of tweets and slogans.
Slogans are not new in social discourse; rather they are old acquaintances that form part of our lives. They entered through advertising (“Because I’m worth it”), through the international echo of political campaigns (“Yes we can”), or through the strength of the demands of various social movements (“Not one ((woman)) less”). What is new is not the textual unit itself, but its constant, every day, and excessive use that the politics 2.0. makes of them. In the analog era, slogans were concentrated in specific periods of electoral campaigns, and that was the slogan practiced and repeated on signs and in meetings. However, the rise of social media has turned his occasional phenomenon into a daily reality, extending beyond campaign periods and amplified by the viral effect of networks, fostering a process of discursive sloganization.
Why does this phenomenon occur? First, we must highlight that from a political communication perspective, social media can be seen as a linguistic or semiotic market—in Bourdieu’s terms—where leaders depend heavily on visibility. Politicians and political parties are forced to build a brand—a techno-ethos—increasingly using digital marketing strategies. This encourages the transfer of propaganda techniques across domains (object-brand, person-brand) and shifts focus away from ideological content toward simple, aesthetic, shareable, clickable messages, often suspending truth and complexity.
Second, various studies have shown that we spend only seconds on each webpage, and our brains decide in milliseconds whether content interests us. This constant bombardment reduces concentration and discourages deep, critical engagement of this content. We live in a state of permanent partial attention, surrounded by distractions and immersed in a fog of words and images. In this context, digital messages must be brief for strategic, technical and cognitive reasons but at the same time must stand out to avoid being lost in the informational noise, which is why political communication coordinators work to make it so that these messages are not ignored. Hashtags (#) are sometimes used because they form an essential part of the pragmatic meaning of a tweet or a post on X, Instagram, or Facebook: they are a type of metadata created with the explicit purpose of being viralized and tracked. Their main function is to make topics and slogans go viral, increasing visibility and aiming to become trends or trending topics. When this happens, the hashtag appears as a highlighted suggestion for users within a community, and although its use is not exclusive to X—it has existed before the creation of this social media—its integration into the platform has given it distinctive features since 2009. It is evident that this is a tool that allows informational, persuasive, or expressive functions to be condensed into a very small space and that connects different discourses, creating environments of affiliation where people gather around shared ideas, causes, or rallying cries.
It is therefore unsurprising that there are apps that exist solely to generate hashtags to maximize impact (see Sistrix ©), promising greater visibility, interaction, and followers, and thus confirming the extent to which keywords and slogans have become central elements of contemporary digital communication.
3. Sloganization and examples in political profiles
Sloganization thus emerges as a consequence of how words function and are used on social media, and its impact, in discursive and democratic terms, can be very significant. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of viral slogans whose purpose is to re-signify political and civic concepts such as freedom, socialism, fascism, democracy, equality, majority, among others. Sloganization is present in all the digital profiles of politicians, parties, and also institutions which, in their desire to become visible, inevitably fall into its grasp. However, it becomes especially extreme and dangerous when its ultimate aim is to propose false, polarizing, or violent interpretive frameworks, so that they are accepted, retweeted, chanted, or enacted without reflection. As Gallardo Paúls (2024) points out, one of the most pernicious features of far-right slogans is their appropriation of words and the imposition of a fixed ideological interpretive framework. Let us now examine some examples of this sloganization in political profiles shaped by a reactionary socio-discursive imagination.”
3.1. Javier Milei
In Madrid Cánovas and Flax (2026), we study Milei’s campaign slogans during the Argentine presidential elections that led to his presidential victory in 2023. The name of the political coalition is itself a slogan (LaLibertadAvanza):“Libertad,” written in uppercase, a personification of an abstract idea that moves with its own force like a human being. That idea is connected to a very simple metaphor: winning an election is like traveling along a path. It is no coincidence that Javier Milei titled his programmatic book El camino del libertario (The Path of the Libertarian). That path suggests that progress depends on having no obstacles, or being strong enough to overcome them. And here lies the key to the discursive implication: when this progress becomes very powerful, it sweeps away everything in its path. In this discourse, that overwhelming and violent force is precisely what Freedom represents.
“The caste is afraid”: A slogan that encapsulates his discourse against the establishment, identifying the traditional political class as a single enemy. “Caste” is the second floating signifier (Laclau and Mouffe 1987) most used by Milei during the campaign, after “freedom.” Floating signifiers are terms contested by different political groups that display such a proliferation of meanings that the link between signifier and signified becomes impossible to fix. The political caste refers to people who spend their entire lives holding political positions in the state. In theory, this would not be an exclusive feature of Kirchnerism (the specific modern variant of Peronism), but given that this occurs during the electoral runoff every time Milei cites this slogan, through implicature the receiver ends up associating it with that party. This creates a univocal meaning link between caste and Peronists.
‘Long live freedom, damn it!”. His most famous slogan, which has become an identity-defining rallying cry among his supporters. It is an utterance that lacks markers of person and tense, since there are no verbs or other grammatical categories that anchor it to a specific time and place; moreover, it is reinforced at the end by a vulgar expression, ‘damn it’ (carajo), which seeks to boastfully intensify the preceding assertion and preempt any possible response. We consider that it functions as a political cry that fosters identification, uses colloquial expressions to speak like ‘the people,’ and creates emotional bonds among those who use it, in a manner similar to other well-known slogans throughout the history of Argentine politics, such as ‘Until victory, always’ or ‘Death to the savage unitarians.’
3.2. Isabel Díaz Ayuso
‘Communism or Freedom’: the central slogan of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s 2021 campaign for the presidency of the Community of Madrid, which polarized the electoral debate by reducing political options to a Manichaean binary, and which has been studied by Riquelme Fernández (2022) and Martín Rojo (2023). Isabel Díaz Ayuso won by a landslide in Madrid by adopting a fairly clear strategy: to win back far-right Vox voters, even if that meant using their discursive style. Since she did not have a guaranteed absolute majority, she just needed such support to govern, and to achieve this she aligned herself with a rhetorical line that had worked very well for Donald Trump: the use of the well-worn culture war and the simplification of political options under the label of communism—once again, we see a floating signifier appear in the slogan. In fact, some international media even referred to her as “the Spanish Trump,” also due to her handling of the pandemic and and her constant confrontation with Pedro Sánchez (Riquelme Fernández, 2022).
“Socialism is the fair distribution of misery”: a repetitive slogan aimed at directly and unambiguously associating the opposition (PSOE) with a negative economic outcome. It was launched during the 2019 Madrid regional election campaign and reformulated in the 2021 campaign as “Socialism is a machine for producing poverty,” reinforcing a dichotomous economic interpretive framework that was later extended to political values: “socialism brings the distribution of misery, authoritarianism, and division.” In this way, the false dichotomy of communism or freedom was expanded into an interpretive framework of poverty vs. wealth (economic, intellectual, social, etc.), leading to recurring public statements between 2022 and 2023 about socialism and the subsidization of poverty, and ultimately resulting in a slogan that went viral among Ayuso’s voters and supporters (ayusistas): #SocialismIsPoverty.
3.3. Donald Trump
The current president of the United States is, without a doubt, that who best embodies the triumph of discursive simplification and the repeated use of slogans. Among them, we can highlight “Make America Great Again” (2016), which was used as the slogan for his first presidential campaign (Vox would later copy it for the 2026 elections: “Make Spain Great Again”) and which ultimately gave rise to a the trumpist movement known by its initials, MAGA. This statement establishes a narrative of a nostalgic past of Northamerican greatness that must be restored, for which the absolute priority should be the country’s interests: “America First.” Through this a interpretive framework is created in which there are countries and individuals who benefit at the expense of Northamericans; therefore, it becomes necessary to limit or shut down foreign trade and halt migration, or, if necessary, punish and insult those who don’t play on their side (a war euphemism): “We have a lot of winners, but Spain is a loser.” In line with any populist discourse, Trump divides the world into a virtuous “us’” and a flawed “them.” When Trump lost the election in November 2020, a new slogan emerged that deepened this confrontation: “Stop the Steal.” This slogan, spread through social media, became the vehicle for the viralization of the false theory of massive electoral fraud, while then movilized hundreds of supporters and leading to the storming of the Capitol. As we can see, a slogan can reach very high levels of performativity and trigger genuine political and human tragedies in a society considered democratic.
3.4. Giorgia Meloni
“Italy and Italians first”: this slogan is an adaptation of Trump’s “America First,” in which national sovereignty is prioritized over supranational cooperation, implying that European, global, and migrant citizens interests are in conflict with those of Italians. However, it was undoubtedly “We defend God, Fatherland, and Family” that gained the greatest media attention in 2019, mainly because it revives the fascist slogan “God, Fatherland, and Family,” used by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. This slogan asserts certain traditional values and condenses its social and cultural program into three key concepts, in three words that constitute a kind of natural or organic foundation of Italianness. According to Meloni, this notion of Italianness excludes secular values, gender equality, and minority rights. Within this same framework operates “We are the silent majority,” which seeks to create a sense of belonging and homogenization around a supposed forgotten collective, one that is not visible in the streets but exists. Once again, the slogan establishes a Manichaean division between a silent majority in contrast with a noisy, critical, activist minority. By doing so Meloni fits squarely within a reactionary socio-discursive imaginary, positioning herself as the defender of a “we” (traditional Italy) against internal threats (progressive values) and external ones (Europe and globalization).
4. Poor words?
Slogans are much more than phrases: they are shortcuts to thinking. In seconds, they tell us what to believe, how to feel, and whom to support. In the digital age, they go viral through hashtags and posts, shaping emotions and simplifying an increasingly complex reality. Politicians such as Milei, Ayuso, Trump, or Meloni rely on sloganization to condense identities, values, and conflicts into a few words without prior questioning: freedom that advances (what is meant by freedom, and why is it assumed it did not exist before? where is it advancing to? is it really advancing?), the nation first (what is the nation, and why should it stand above values or human rights?), the silent majority (who determines who that majority is? is there also a silent minority?). Ultimately, sloganization is the verbal reflection of a fast, digital, information-saturated society: a phenomenon that blends communication, persuasion, and strong symbolic power, reminding us that, in politics as in everyday life, words matter as much as the thoughts—poor or rich—that they enable—or prevent—from being formed. The comfort of letting others think in our place comes at a cost, especially when the opposite is insisted upon. Ceci n’est pas un slogan.
REFERENCES
Fernández Riquelme, Pedro (2022). Communism or Freedom: Right-Wing Populist Discourse and the False Disjunctives. En Juan José Gómez, José Abdelnour-Nocera y Esteban Anchústegui (eds.), Democratic Institutions and Practices. Cham, Springer, pp. 105-123.
Gallardo Paúls, Beatriz (2024). El análisis de una lingüista: ¿qué hay detrás de la apropiación del lema ‘Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo’? https://agendapublica.es/noticia/19470/analisis-linguista-qu-hay-detras-apropiacion-lema-solo-pueblo-salva-al-pueblo
Madrid Cánovas, Sonia y Flax, Rocío (2026) «Viva la libertad carajo!». Análisis discursivo de los eslóganes de Milei en X durante las elecciones presidenciales argentinas de 2023. Rilce. Revista De Filología Hispánica, 42(1), 281-311. https://doi.org/10.15581/008.42.1.281-311
Martín Rojo, Luisa (2023). The Anti-establishment Discourses of the Radical Right in Spain: on ‘Freedom’ and Libertarianism During the Pandemic. En Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard y Malcom Coulthard (eds.), Texts and Practices Revisited. Essential Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis. Londres, Routledge, pp. 134-151.
