Duanhong Cao, Yanbing Xiong

Yanbing Xiong

27 Feb. 2023

Critical discourse analysis, Social media, News communication, Ideology, Multilevel contextual analysis, Multimodal critical discourse studies.

As the primary medium of mass communication, social media is increasingly incorporating news dissemination. The dominance of text in social media is gradually being replaced by non-textual expressions. The communication way of social media obscures the significance of ideology in the communication process. Its strong commercial characteristics have converted the news transmission area into a space for commercial promotion. The echo chamber phenomenon has emerged in news communication, signaling a more complex power structure in the operation of journalism. All these create challenges for critical discourse analysis, which must adapt to the new communication environment created by social media. By analyzing the news of the 2016 Trump anti-China coverage, Black Lives Matter (BLM) reports, and the news echo chamber phenomenon in the 2016 presidential election, this article explores the non-textual expressions, confusing ideologies, and commercialized spaces that social media provides for critical discourse analysis. The shift in van Dijk's news discourse critical framework, multimodal critical discourse research, and multilevel contextual analysis are proposed and analyzed to meet the current issues. While the emergence of social media presents challenges for the study of critical discourse, it also harbors opportunities for change, enhancing the framework's ability to reveal and emancipate reality.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license