Gardam, C., Riedlinger, M., Angus, D., & Tan, X. Y. (. (2025). Multimodal narratives of climate denial: A novel, visual-first methodology for analysing conspiracy theory discourse on Instagram. Discourse, Context & Media, 68, 100946. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2025.100946
Summary
This paper introduces a visual-first methodology for analysing multimodal climate denial and conspiracy theory discourse on Instagram. The authors argue that prevailing text-centric approaches are ill-suited to platforms where images carry the primary communicative load, and propose a framework that foregrounds visual elements while integrating captions, hashtags, and broader platform context. Positioned within multimodal discourse analysis and media studies, the work responds to a methodological gap in the study of image-driven social media, treating visual analysis as central rather than supplementary to understanding how conspiracy narratives about climate circulate.
Key Contributions
- Introduces a novel visual-first methodological framework for studying multimodal discourse on image-driven platforms.
- Extends discourse-analytic tools for examining climate denial and conspiracy theory communication specifically.
- Offers a replicable analytical framework transferable to other domains of visual conspiracy discourse on platforms like Instagram.
Methods
The paper develops and articulates a new visual-first framework for multimodal discourse analysis, then demonstrates it on Instagram content related to climate denial and conspiracy theories. Rather than treating text as the anchor, the approach begins from the image and layers in accompanying textual and contextual cues — captions, hashtags, and platform affordances — to reconstruct narrative strategies.
Findings
- Instagram climate denial discourse relies heavily on visual rhetorical strategies that text-first methods systematically underrepresent.
- Multimodal narrative structures are central to how climate conspiracy theories are constructed and circulated on the platform.
- Integrating visual with textual and contextual interpretation surfaces denial strategies that would otherwise be missed.
Connections
This work sits within the broader study of conspiracy narratives in media, complementing sociological and rhetorical accounts of how conspiracy communities operate, such as Grusauskaite2026-po and Marwick2025-ov. Its focus on the visual and platform-specific circulation of contested claims links it to research on image-centric and multimodal political communication like Achmann-Denkler2026-lx and to studies of how such content propagates across social platforms, including Bruns2025-fz. The paper is primarily methodological rather than computational, so it stands somewhat apart from the LLM-annotation strand of the register.