Tweeting climate: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of British MPs’ discursive performances on Twitter during COP26

Since their appearance, social networks have been massively employed by political figures to communicate with their constituents: among them, Twitter can be considered as a strong political tool (Grant et al. 2010). By granting political figures unprecedented visibility, the micro-blogging platform created in 2006 gave political actors the opportunity to inform mass numbers of people about their political activities instantaneously. Furthermore, its intrinsic ability to condense written texts, images, videos and audios in a single space, made this platform the ideal vehicle for self-promotion (Jakson and Lilleker 2011) and for personal branding, helping politicians to fulfil the need for authenticity (Enli 2016; Micalizzi and Piccioni 2021). These affordances have been particularly exploited during times of intense public scrutiny, such as during the Conference of Parties (COP), where the international political ruling class is called to answer and deliver effective solutions to tackle the climate crisis. The aim of this work is that of analysing how British MPs have discursively and visually performedtheirroleduringCOP26onTwitter. Specifically, using a multimodal qualitative approach (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006; Machin and Mayr 2012), we analyse how British MPs Boris Johnson (Conservative Party), Edward Miliband (Labour Party), Caroline Lucas (Green Party), Nicola Sturgeon (Scottish National Party), Nigel Farage (Reform UK) and Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats) performed their role as participants in COP26 events through visual and textual discourse practices on Twitter. Choosing ten tweets per political figure according to their impact, we find that comparatively there are both similarities in their use of Twitter as a broadcasting mean (Graham et al. 2013) but differences in the discursive construction of their participation.