PurposeInformation is presented in various modalities such as text and images, and it can quickly and widely spread on social networks and among the general public through key communication nodes involved in public opinion events. Therefore, by tracking and identifying key nodes of public opinion, we can determine the direction of public opinion evolution and timely and effectively control public opinion events or curb the spread of false information.Design/methodology/approachThis paper introduces a novel multimodal semantic enhanced representation based on multianchor mapping semantic community (MAMSC) for identifying key nodes in public opinion. MAMSC consists of four core components: multimodal data feature extraction module, feature vector dimensionality reduction module, semantic enhanced representation module and semantic community (SC) recognition module. On this basis, we combine the method of community discovery in complex networks to analyze the aggregation characteristics of different semantic anchors and construct a three-layer network module for public opinion node recognition in the SC with strong, medium and weak associations.FindingsThe experimental results show that compared with its variants and the baseline models, the MAMSC model has better recognition accuracy. This study also provides more systematic, forward-looking and scientific decision-making support for controlling public opinion and curbing the spread of false information.Originality/valueWe creatively combine the construction of variant autoencoder with multianchor mapping to enhance semantic representation and construct a three-layer network module for public opinion node recognition in the SC with strong, medium and weak associations. On this basis, our constructed MAMSC model achieved the best results compared to the baseline models and ablation evaluation models, with a precision of 91.21%.