Linguistic Politeness in The Digital Era: Multimodal Communication on Social Media Platforms
Keywords:
politeness; multimodality; digital discourse; social media; pragmaticsAbstract
The rise of digital communication has transformed linguistic politeness from predominantly verbal interaction into increasingly multimodal practices involving text, emojis, memes, hashtags, reaction buttons, images, and short-form videos. Existing politeness studies largely rely on traditional face-to-face frameworks such as Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, which falls short in explaining how people make meaning in social media contexts driven by algorithms. Previous studies tend to focus on single-platform textual interactions, impoliteness, cyberbullying, or isolated emoji use, while limited research examines cross-platform multimodal politeness practices. This study uses a multimodal pragmatic framework to examine how politeness strategies are created on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Between January and March 2026, 100 digital interactions were gathered via public comments, captions, video responses, and reaction features using qualitative multimodal discourse analysis. The results show that communication in the digital era is inherently multimodal. Users on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok strategically combine language with visual and audiovisual resources to express politeness, build relationships, and achieve communicative goals. The dominance of positive politeness across the three platforms suggests that social media users prioritize creating a friendly, supportive, and engaging environment. These findings support the view that effective digital communication depends on the interaction between linguistic and multimodal elements, which together shape meaning and social relationships in online contexts.
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