ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide insights into the climate denial discourse on social media, with a particular focus on its visual aspects. Using methods of multimodal critical discourse analysis and content analysis, the research examines content on Instagram tagged #climatehoax or #climatechangehoax. Results show that climate denial communication on the platform is characterised by a strong negative referentiality that embeds scepticism about anthropogenic climate change in a broad web of conspiracy theories, forming an incomplete and self-contradictory super conspiracy theory. Despite Instagram’s primarily visual character, less than a fourth of the analysed corpus does pictorially formulate the issue. Content re-frames climate change-related visuals used and established by the media according to the denier narrative. Thus, negative reflexivity is also manifest at the level of visual communication through the large-scale recycling of images. Rhetorically humour and irony are the main weapons of this communication, which helps far-right movements and groups to become dominant actors in internet culture.
