A Pragmatic Study of Politeness in Social Media Discourse: Al Jazeera’s English Instagram Palestine Reporting

Social media functions as a platform for public discussion that allows users to convey criticism and supports toward certain topics. One of most widely discussed issues is the situation in Palestine, which frequently receives large-scale public responses in Instagram comment sections. Despite numerous studies on politeness and impoliteness in online discourse, limited attention has been given to how these strategies realize commenters’ attitudes. This study investigates the politeness and impoliteness strategies employed in netizens’ comments on Al Jazeera English Instagram posts reporting on the humanitarian crisis in Palestine and examines how these strategies realize commenters’ attitudes toward the issue. This study employed a qualitative approach using text analysis. The data consisted of 100 English comments collected through purposive criterion sampling from eleven selected posts. The comments were analyzed using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, Culpeper’s (1996) Impoliteness Theory, and Martin and White’s (2005) Attitude Framework. The findings revealed that impoliteness strategies were more frequent than politeness strategies, with 74 comments contained impoliteness and 26 politeness. Off Record was the most frequently used politeness strategy (13 occurrences), whereas Positive Impoliteness was the dominant impoliteness strategy (31 occurrences). The attitude analysis indicated that negative attitudes were more dominant than positive attitudes. Positive attitudes were mainly realized through Positive Politeness and some Bald on Record strategies, while negative attitudes were commonly realized through Off Record politeness and all impoliteness strategies. The findings demonstrate that politeness and impoliteness strategies function not only as interactional devices but also as linguistic resources for realizing attitudes.