Lockdown scepticism: Australian and American doom discourse on Reddit

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent infodemic, user consumption of online news content soared, leading issues doom-scrolling doom-writing. This type behaviour may have an adverse impact on individual well-being increase exposure misinformation social networking sites (SNSs), including Reddit. The present critical discourse study combines Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Pragma-dialectics (PD) theory explore roles power ideology in a corpus extracted from r/LockdownSkepticismAU r/LockdownSkepticism, evaluate Redditors’ argumentation. analysis shows that users both subreddits appear compensate perceived loss agency by making improbable statements about future. doomers’ arguments, as part their deliberations relating national prevention policy, reveal several fallacies. Linguistic evidence is provided for how biopower, its ability further life or death, constitutive norms which subreddit communities subscribe.