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 proposes a visual-first methodology for analysing multimodal climate denial and conspiracy theory discourse on Instagram. The authors argue that established, text-centric analytical approaches are ill-suited to image-driven platforms where visual elements carry the primary communicative weight. Rather than treating images as supplementary to text, the framework foregrounds visual rhetoric while integrating captions, hashtags, and platform context as interpretive cues. The contribution is positioned within multimodal discourse analysis and media studies, addressing a methodological gap in the study of how conspiracy narratives circulate on visually dominant social media.
Key Contributions
- Introduces a novel visual-first methodological framework for studying multimodal discourse on image-driven platforms.
- Extends discourse analytic tools to the specific case of climate denial and conspiracy theory communication.
- Provides a replicable framework applicable to other domains of visual conspiracy discourse beyond climate on platforms like Instagram.
Methods
The paper is primarily methodological in nature. It develops and articulates a visual-first analytical framework, then applies it to Instagram content related to climate denial and conspiracy theories. The approach centres visual analysis while systematically attending to accompanying captions, hashtags, and broader platform affordances and context, combining these into an integrated multimodal reading.
Findings
- Instagram climate denial discourse depends heavily on visual rhetorical strategies that text-first methods tend to underrepresent or miss entirely.
- Multimodal narrative structures are central to how climate conspiracy theories are constructed and circulated on the platform.
- Integrating visual, textual, and contextual analysis surfaces denial strategies that purely textual methods overlook.
Connections
This work sits alongside other platform-specific studies of conspiracy and extremist visual/multimodal communication, including analyses of far-right image and video culture such as Rothut2026-or and Rothut2026-wt, and ethnographic and network approaches to online conspiracy communities such as Grusauskaite2026-po. It complements the climate-focused misinformation literature on countering denial narratives, notably Spampatti2026-kx and van-der-Linden2026-jt, by supplying the analytical tools needed to characterise the visual discourse those interventions must ultimately contend with.