Responding to the COVID-19 Emergency: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Media Populist Discourse in the UK and USA

The COVID-19 pandemic represented an unprecedented global emergency that caused widespread turmoil. Most governments responded to this threat by establishing national quarantines in order to stem the tide of infections and prevent hospital overflows. Other than being a public health hazard, COVID-19 also brought with it serious social and economic hardships (Lorenzetti, 2022). In light of the worldwide shared feeling of distress, malaise and fear, the COVID-19 pandemic can be considered as a fully-fledged crisis (Coman et al., 2021). Drawing on the tight relationship that exists between populism and crises, by following a multimodal critical discourse analysis framework (Machin and Mayr 2023), this work aims to explore how populist leaders from the UK and the USA communicated on Twitter from March to May 2020. The analysis will consider both right-wing (Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis) and left-wing (Nicola Sturgeon, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders) politicians, to highlight the differences between the strategies employed across the two sides of the political spectrum.