Everybody remembers the imagery of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011: the tsunami, the wrecked plant, the victims, politicians discussing the aftermath. In 2023, Fukushima was back in the news: Japan began the gradual discharge of treated plant water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. Instagram quickly became a space where private users as well as institutions shared concerns, reactions, interpretations and feelings about this decision. The topic was and still is emotionally and politically charged.
But when I started scrolling through these posts, I noticed something interesting: I expected strong emotional language. But people mostly don’t say “I am furious” or “this makes me anxious”. And still, I could feel the emotions on my screen.
This led me to the question: How do Instagram users construct emotions without actually naming them?
Why Instagram?
Instagram is particularly interesting here because it is not only about the textual caption. Small videos, stories, images, and emojis all together create meaning. On a text level, we also find hashtags, typographic choices, or even punctuation, which all fuse together and create an emotional impression as a whole.
This already indicates that for this sample, emotions are rarely communicated in a straightforward way. Instead of saying what they feel, in this sample, Instagram users tend to show the emotional cues in various ways. Emotions on the platform are therefore constructed.
For this small-scale qualitative analysis, I examined 40 publicly available English-language Instagram posts about the Fukushima water release, collected in 2024. The posts were selected to include both private users and institutional accounts such as news outlets. It quickly became clear that explicit emotion words are rare and clearly not the main means of constructing emotion in this sample. What dominates is indirect and mostly multimodal emotional communication.
As Figure 2 shows, only a small proportion of the posts really contain explicit emotion terms, suggesting that emotional meaning is more often communicated indirectly.
Emotion Talk vs. Emotional Talk
A helpful distinction for this matter comes from language researcher Monika Bednarek, who distinguishes emotion talk and emotional talk . Emotion talk refers to the straightforward naming of feelings, for instance “I am angry” or “this scares me a lot”. Emotional talk, on the other hand, works more indirectly. It relies on language or other signals to evoke emotions without directly stating them.
Looking at these Fukushima Instagram posts, emotion talk is used only sparingly, and emotional talk clearly dominates. Emotional meaning is built by context, wording, visuals, and subtle means of representation, which suggests that explicitly named feelings are rarely shared in these online posts.
The examples in Figure 4 illustrate the differences between directly naming an emotion and creating emotional meaning through indirect language.
Disaster Language
One of the strongest emotional signals comes from the disaster-related vocabulary itself. Terms like meltdown , radioactive , contamination , uninhabitable carry heavy and rather negative associations. These terms evoke concepts like danger, risk, survival or death, and carry connotations of irreversibility.
Without stating an emotion directly, this type of vocabulary potentially triggers an emotional response. Linguist Friedrich Ungerer describes this as a “life and death” principle because such terms signal threat or catastrophe and this can contribute to a sense of danger. Even without explicit emotion talk, language already contributes much to the emotional effect.
On Instagram, this is intensified by the uploaded images: we can see damaged reactor sites, or a dying seahorse, dead fish, or the atomic exclusion zone. It seems that an image can already carry the emotional weight. Sometimes the caption is minimal, yet the emotional imagery is still quite clear.
Addressing the Audience
Another striking feature is how posts actively try to involve the reader. Many captions use questions or direct imperatives, such as:
- “Which do they protect, plants or people?”
- “Let’s not forget”
These forms of address, such as imperatives or questions, reduce the distance between the reader and the post, as identified by Bianka Schönbrunn who studied this in newspapers. Such forms invite readers not only to empathize with the person posting, but also to reflect on the situation themselves, or even to take a position. Even without naming an emotion, the post can create a sense of emotional involvement.
Interestingly, in our sample, this strategy is especially common in posts by private users, who often seem to engage with the audience by direct addresses.
Small Details: Typography and Emojis
Some additional potentially emotional signals are easy to overlook. Typography, for instance, plays an important role: multiple exclamation marks, capitalisation, or short expressive phrases like “on a whim!!!!”. They signal intensity without using direct emotional vocabulary.
Surprisingly, emojis play a smaller role than one would expect. If they do appear, they usually reinforce what has already been communicated before and do not introduce new emotions, for example:
- We still have time for speaking out our voice and showing our love in our own way 💚
- #manmadedisaster 💔
Different Voices on the Platform
Not all investigated Instagram posts communicate emotion the same way. The biggest differences emerge between private users and institutional actors such as news outlets.
The news outlet example shows how newspaper accounts quote certain statements instead of presenting them as their own words. This may allow the news account to include strong evaluation while still maintaining a certain degree of distance. In this way, negative evaluation is present in the posts but strategically used by relying on someone else’s voice.
Even though both types of Instagram accounts communicate emotion, they do it in different ways, depending on their role.
The Importance of Images
Perhaps, the most important insight of the Fukushima Daiichi Instagram sample is this: on social media, the evocation of emotion is not only in words.
In my sample, photos of abandoned reactors or affected animals can convey associations with concern, unease, or sadness, even if the caption itself is neutral. Emotional meaning, after all, on social media is built up multimodally, through the interplay of image, language, and platform design, as has been described earlier by the researchers Kress and van Leeuwen in their work. This combination is what makes social media discourse a genuinely multimodal object of study.
What This Tells Us About Emotions Online
The example of Instagram makes it clear that emotions in the digital sphere are rarely straightforward. They are shaped by typical platform features and social roles. Interestingly, hashtags do not primarily function as emotional signposting in the sample, but they seem to work more as markers of positioning, showing which side of a debate a post aligns with, as suggested by Michele Zappavigna a few years ago. The social psychologist Bernard Rimé has likewise pointed out, “the social sharing process is observed whatever the type of emotion involved” – emotions are fundamentally social and often shared with others and social media platforms such as Instagram are where this sharing becomes visible.
In sum, emotions are not simply “there” in an Instagram post. They are, sometimes subtly, sometimes very directly, built by a combination of language, image, and other platform typical features. For me, the more interesting question was not what people feel exactly, but how they make emotion visible.
References
Bednarek , Monika. 2008. Emotion Talk across Corpora . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kress , Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen . 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication . London: Arnold.
Rimé , Bernard. 2017. “The Social Sharing of Emotion in Interpersonal and in Collective Situations.” In Cyberemotions: Understanding Complex Systems , edited by Janusz A. Hołyst, 53–69. Cham: Jumps.
Schönbrunn , Bianka. 2015. Emotionality in der Berichterstattung deutscher und französische Tageszeitungen: Ein interkultureller Vergleich . Berlin: Frank & Timme.
Ungerer , Friedrich. 1997. “Emotions and Emotional Language in English and German News Stories.” In The Language of Emotions: Conceptualization, Expression, and Theoretical Foundation , edited by Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven, 307–328. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Zappavigna , Michele. 2021. “Evaluation.” In Pragmatics of Social Media , edited by Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker, and Klaus P. Schneider, 436–458. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Vanessa Hagenschulte is a doctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The Instagram sample was compiled by the author in 2024 and is available on request.
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