Multimodal irony in public responses to digitally mediated NHS COVID-19 messaging

Abstract

This study investigates how multimodal irony is discursively constructed in the expression of stance and evaluation in comments responding to the UK National Health Service’s (NHS) COVID-19 policy posts on Twitter/X. Using a discursive pragmatic approach, we identified and analysed comments containing instances of multimodal irony targeting COVID-19 policies, institutional authorities, and policy supporters. Our analysis shows that multimodal irony enables users to express negative stance and evaluation indirectly, reframe institutional messaging, and construct in-group alignment among those expressing dissatisfaction by creating and conventionalising semiotic signals. We argue Twitter/X’s platform features, including textual brevity, multimodal richness, threaded interaction, and perceived anonymity, to be critical factors in enabling the construction and circulation of such content. While we do not claim that the comment dataset we analyse represents general public opinion, the ironic responses identified may nonetheless carry communicative influence with other social media users due to their perceived authenticity and peer-like positioning. This influence is likely amplified by platform dynamics which favour affectively loaded and oppositional content, leading to an overrepresentation of dissenting voices relative to more compliant or non-evaluative responses. Significantly, these comments form part of the broader discursive ecosystem of digital crisis communication – in this case, relating to COVID-19 – in which institutional messages are not passively received but actively evaluated, reinterpreted and reframed. This study additionally offers an empirically grounded framework for identifying and analysing multimodal irony in social media discourse and highlights its relevance for understanding the negotiation of institutional legitimacy in digitally mediated contexts of public health communication.