Multimodal narratives of climate denial: A novel, visual-first methodology for analysing conspiracy theory discourse on Instagram

Summary

Gardam and colleagues propose a visual-first methodology for analysing how climate denial and conspiracy narratives circulate on Instagram. They argue that prevailing text-centric approaches to social media discourse analysis fail to capture the rhetorical work done by images on image-driven platforms, and that climate denial in particular relies on multimodal narrative strategies that are largely invisible to caption- or hashtag-led analyses. The paper offers both a methodological framework — foregrounding visual elements while integrating captions, hashtags, and platform context — and an empirical demonstration of its application to Instagram climate denial content.

Key Contributions

• A novel visual-first methodological framework for multimodal discourse analysis on image-centric social media.
• An application of this framework to climate denial and conspiracy theory discourse on Instagram.
• A replicable analytical procedure intended to transfer to other domains of visual conspiracy discourse.
• A conceptual argument that visual analysis should be treated as central, not supplementary, in studies of platform-mediated misinformation.

Methods

The authors develop and articulate a visual-first analytical framework, then apply it to Instagram content concerned with climate denial and conspiracy narratives. Analysis foregrounds image content and composition while systematically integrating accompanying captions, hashtags, and contextual platform cues, enabling interpretation of how visual and textual modes jointly construct denialist narratives.

Findings

• Instagram climate denial discourse leans heavily on visual rhetorical strategies that text-first methods systematically underrepresent.
• Multimodal narrative structures are central to how climate conspiracy theories are constructed, legitimised, and circulated on the platform.
• Captions and hashtags often function as anchors or framing devices for visual claims rather than as the primary site of argument.

Connections

This paper sits alongside other work in the register on how misinformation and conspiracy narratives are produced and circulated on visual or platform-specific terrain — notably Kansaon2025-id and other platform-focused studies of disorderly information. Its methodological orientation toward conspiracy discourse connects to broader treatments of conspiracist communication such as Marwick2025-ov and Frischlich2025-vn, while its concern with climate-related denial and manipulation resonates with Spampatti2026-kx and inoculation-oriented work like van-der-Linden2026-jt. Most of the other papers in the topic address text-based or network-level misinformation dynamics and are only loosely related.