Abstract
ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic uniquely represents an unprecedented health crisis that has permeated all aspects of human society. Given the technological affordances of social media to disseminate fact-based as well as purposefully misinformed and/or conspiratorial information, this paper examines the serious and strategic messaging on Instagram posts tagged with #civilwar2. Results from a critical discourse analysis show that within modern American conspiratorial thinking and given the problematic politicization of COVID-19, healthy scepticism is replaced with conspiracy absent of theory. When extreme political and socio-cultural polarization occurs, this tendency is exacerbated by the bifurcation of meaning as expressed by those who seek to promote a particular angle of a given story or event. While this may be somewhat common in so-called old media, online in discursive spaces such as Instagram, the challenge to understand the mediated message is compounded by visual referents, which are often remixed to include adjunct information, such as mashups, hashtags, inserted text, or images, etc. Results include the identification of two main categories of Instagram memes tagged with #civilwar2. These categories are analysed following three primary characteristics of discourse: genre, discourse/representation, and style.
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