Uncovering Ideological Polarization: A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Media Posts of Representatives of Iran and US During Iran-US conflict 2026
Abstract
In the contemporary geopolitical landscape, communication through social media platforms acts as the space to construct the narrative of war and peace. However, existing literature failed to address how the adversarial political actors utilize social media to construct their favorable narratives. This study examines the digital media posts of U.S. representative, Trump, from Truth Social and two Iranian representatives, Araghchi and Baqaei, from X to investigate the shift in strategic use of linguistic feature to frame “us vs them” ideology and “war” and “peace” narratives across three phases: pre-peace talks (3–9 April), during peace talks (10–12 April), and post-peace talks (13–19 April). This study employs Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the primary framework to analyze the discourse at the micro level through textual analysis and integrates van Dijk's ideological Square and Chilton's Deictic Space Theory (DST) at this level. At the macro level, it explores the broader discursive and social practices in the discourse. The posts are selected using purposive sampling to compare ideological framing of power, military dominance, legitimacy, resistance, and national identity. The findings of the study reveal that political actors of both states maintain “us vs them” dichotomy through ideological polarization, strategic semantic fields, and deictic positioning. Moreover, the embedded discourse of peace through the competing ideologies of hegemony and sovereignty reflects that in modern geopolitical crisis, the linguistic features of diplomatic relations function not only as conflict resolution but also as a source of maintaining power and ideological dominance. The finding of this study which sets it apart from the previous researches is the emergence of temporal compression theme. US representative uses language to compress time, transforming it into combat instrument to coerce inter-state conflict.