By Ida Marie Iversen & Jonas Lykou Lund, Junior Researchers

 

On the 22nd of July 2024, global pop icon Charli XCX tweeted “Kamala IS brat”, a seemingly simple statement that quickly became a momentary defining moment in the 2024 presidential election. At this point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had cultivated a strong connection to pop culture, where internet subculture and mainstream politics and linguistics converge on the internet. In the Guardian, Sam Wolfson observed: “This election is not being fought on proposed policies or past accomplishments. It’s being fought on vibes” (Wolfson, 2024).

But what is meant by vibes? In this article, vibes are contextualized and constructed through historical, cultural and linguistic movements. Understanding the ecosystem of vibes has been a goal of ours from the start. Thus, an important effort of this project lies within literature search and -review. Vibes are seen as performative, highlighting the subjective nature of language and words, viewing utterances not as neutral mediums, but as powerful arenas wherein knowledge and meaning of the social world are actively shaped (Tonkiss, 2012).

This post seeks to investigate how these digital phenomena – born in the chaotic, meme-filled corners of the internet, are used as political currency. By tracing their evolution from niche communities to influencing campaigns, we aim to visualize and uncover their cultural traces in web scraping. Through data gathering, analysis, and visualization, we wish to understand how vibes become votes, and how the language of the internet rewrites the rules of political discourse.

 

Understanding vibes as a situated perspective

Rather than framing this article strictly as a literary analysis, we approach vibes as a socially and culturally situated phenomenon, rooted in lived experience, digital interaction, and symbolic exchange. Vibes, as we introduced above, operate beyond traditional linguistic categories, as we understand them as contextualized and constructed through historical, cultural and linguistic movements. These are therefore not just seen as merely utterances, but as performative. To understand vibes is to understand how people communicate feelings and values non-explicitly, often through style, tone, aesthetics, and repetition.

Vibes may be classified as a form of internet slang. Damirjian (2024) describes how slang has historically been understood as a language of obscenity and vulgarity used by criminals and vagabonds to keep activities secret; however, it is now used in all layers of society, and often more admired for its creativity, vitality and humor. Once considered marginal, slang now holds sociolinguistic value and is a lens to understand the evolution of language. This is critical to how we understand vibes, as not just words, but as signs encoded within cultural expressions online (Damirjian, 2024).

Bourdieu’s theory of capital can be used to understand how vibes function as both social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). While recognizing the idea that all exchange is oriented toward the maximization of profit, seeing vibes as capital to be exchanged between cultural and social capital (power) has served as an important inspiration. A main argument exists within the idea that vibes are strong social capital – allowing users a membership in a group – and simultaneously acting as cultural capital – a ‘credential’ which entitles members to credit. Therefore, the volume of social capital is conditioned by the cultural capital (Giddens & Sutton, 2021).

Our framing is inspired by Kehrer’s paper ‘Who Slays?’ (2019), wherein she explores how the album Lemonade cultivates resonances of empowerment and belonging within marginalized communities. Kehrer’s work exemplifies how a cultural text and a participatory moment, invite audiences to co-construct meaning and claim ownership over the narrative. Inspired by this framing, vibes are not just slang, co-constructed by online users. Expressions like “slay” is therefore not just slang, but an expression that invokes a history of performative linguistics rooted in black and queer culture. Vibes, therefore, create participatory, co-constructed moments where meaning is constantly negotiated.

Drawing on these authors, we resist reading vibes strictly through literature and instead approach them as affective, aesthetic, and political practices. We argue that vibes are encoded with meaning, not just empty expressions, and act as real markers of inclusion, alignment and resistance in online spaces, ripe for analysis to understand the cross-section of politics and online culture. In short, understanding vibes means understanding how culture moves, how belonging is signaled and how power is distributed through language.

 

 

Our approach

This article is based on scraping and data visualizations, conducted using Visual Network Analysis (VNA), providing an analytic lens based on visualizations of data. VNA was chosen as it provides a set of principles to explore complex datasets, where uncertainty is embraced for analysis. The foundation of VNA is uncovering patterns in datasets through visualizations, such as revealing clusters, central nodes and structural holes. These visualizations make pattern recognition easier, aiding the researcher in the creation of hypotheses for analysis by balancing clarity with complexity (Venturini et. al., 2021). As VNA provides principles for how to methodologically conduct analysis, we chose to combine it with two sets of tools, allowing us to do data analysis. First, we utilized the open-source web-based research tool ‘4CAT’ to capture data (Tweets) on X, the social media platform used in this article. 4CAT is a tool made for automating netscraping, using a transparent method by avoiding black-boxing methods and documenting all steps in the scraping (Peeters & Hagen, 2022). Lastly, 4CAT is combined with the data visualization tool Gephi, providing the possibility to work with modularity, complementing VNA. Furthermore, Gephi helps us visualize clusters and identify sub-cultures within the vibes.

 

Case: Vibes, Slang and Cultural capital in digital discourse

In this article, we explore how internet slang and “vibes” shape online political and cultural conversations. We analyze two examples using online scraping: the viral use of “BRAT” in relation to Kamala Harris during the 2024 U.S. election and the broader diffusion of ballroom cultural expressions like slay and vogueing.

On the 20th of October 2024, we collected data from X following the viral “Kamala is BRAT” tweet. Using both the “Top” and “Latest” tabs, we captured posts from influential- and everyday users. Visualizing this data with Gephi’s ForceAtlas 2 algorithm, we mapped key hashtags and revealed thematic clusters.

The result revealed distinct clusters around Trump and Harris. Trumps clusters appeared loosely connected, while Harris’s clusters was denser and more connected, centered around expressions like “empowerment”, “justice”, “leadership”, “diversityinpolitics” etc. Interestingly, the term “vibes” emerges at the center of the network, linking both the Kamala and Trump cluster, suggesting a linkage between politics and vibes. This could indicate how slang and vibes played a part in the language during the period of the 2024 US election.

To further understand the spread of digital slang, we looked at two expressions from ballroom culture, “slay” and “voguing”. Originally, these were a part of Black and Latin queer communities in the 1960s New York; these terms carried deep cultural weight and were tied to identity, resistance, belonging and performance (Kehrer, 2018 & Lawrence, 2013).

We scraped and visualized data from both terms, expecting “slay” to be widely used across internet subcultures on X and “voguing” to remain more niche. Surprisingly, both showed broad, unclustered patterns. “Slay” appeared in K-pop fandoms and empowerment posts by predominantly women, while “voguing” also surfaced in similar context. This could suggest both have been widely adopted and, in some cases, decontextualized.

In sum, these two examples show how internet slang and vibes operate as everchanging cultural capital. Terms like “BRAT”, “slay” and “voguing” carry meaning far beyond their literate use and show signs of dilution and decontextualization, creating new online identities and belongings. As Kehrer (2019) suggests, such expressions can both empower and evolve, losing some of their original context and meaning when spread across different subcultures.

 

Conclusion

The analysis of Charli XCX’s “Kamala IS brat” tweet and its influence on the 2024 US presidential election illustrates a shift from policy-driven politics toward affective and culturally resonant communication. By situating “vibes” as forms of both cultural and social capital, the study highlights how seemingly casual expressions carry substantial weight, influencing voter engagement and political identity.

Through methodological approaches employing Visual Network Analysis, data scraping, and visualization, the article has mapped the diffusion and clustering of specific slang terms such as “brat,” “slay,” and “voguing”. We expected these terms to be deeply embedded in marginalized subcultures, but found their use spread across mainstream culture, often losing their contextual depth. This transformation reflects both the potential and the pitfalls of leveraging cultural capital in politics, suggesting that while vibes can powerfully resonate and mobilize voters, their widespread diffusion may dilute their original meanings and connections to identity, belonging and empowerment.

Ultimately, this study underscores the complex interplay between politics, digital linguistics, and cultural phenomena. It indicates a need for further exploration into how these rapidly evolving digital dynamics influence democracy, voter engagement, and political authenticity in the digital age.

 

Figure 1: Scraping of the word “BRAT” on the SoMe platform X. 20. October 2024.

Figure 2: A closeup of figure 1, showing some of the connections to “kamalaharris”.

Figure 3: A closeup of figure 1, showing some of the connections to “trump”.

Figure 4: A closeup of figure 1, showing some of the connections to “vibes”.


Figure 5: Scraping of the word “slay” on the SoMe platform X. 31. March 2025.

Figure 6: Scraping of the word ” voguing ” on the SoMe platform X. 1. April 2025.

References

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Damirjian, A. (2024). “The social significance of slang”, in Mind & Language, Wiley.

Giddens, A. & Sutton, P.W. (2021). “Sociology”, Polity Press, 9th edition. Page: 644-652.

Jäger, A. (2024). Hyperpolitik, Information Forlag.

Kehrer, L. (2018).  ”Who Slays? Queer Resonances in Beyoncé’s Lemonade”, Popular music and society, volume 42. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2019.1555896

Lawrence, T. (2013). “’Listen, and You Will Hear all the Houses that Walked There Before’: A History of Drag Balls, Houses and the Culture of Voguing”. London: Soul Jazz, 2011, Tim Lawrence. Visited on the 23rd of April 2025.Available at: https://www.timlawrence.info/articles2/2013/7/16/listen-and-you-will-hear-all-the-houses-that-walked-there-before-a-history-of-drag-balls-houses-and-the-culture-of-voguing

Peeter, S., Hagen, S. (2022). The 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit: A Modular Tool for Transparent and Traceable Social Media Research, Amsterdam University Press.

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Venturini, T., Jacomy, M., & Jensen, P. (2021). What do we see when we look at networks: Visual network analysis, relational ambiguity, and force-directed layouts, Big Data and Society, Sage.

Wolfson, S. (2024). Brats, dads and bravado: this US election will be decided on vibes, The Guardian. visited on the 23rd of April 2025. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/09/kamala-harris-donald-trump-vibes-personalities