Ideological framing in the public’s response to social media news on the Air India Flight 171 disaster

Abstract

This study examines the ideological frames that characterized public comments in response to online news on the Air India Flight 171 crash. Drawing on frame theory in discourse studies and a critical discourse analysis approach, the study examines comments from major online news portals in India, the UK, and the US as the public’s response to the plane crash. The findings reveal three main ideologies used by members of the public to make sense of the tragedy and to come to terms with it. They include blame attribution, national belonging, and public compassion and they illustrate how the public’s use of language to discuss an international disaster can (un)consciously realize ideological functions. The findings also show that the ideological framing of the plane crash enabled members of the public to select and emphasize specific aspects of the tragedy in their attempt to provide a particular problem definition, encourage or discourage certain interpretations, and make recommendations on issues surrounding the plane crash. The implications of the study for research on crisis communication, discursive framing, and digital meaning-making in social media discourse studies have been discussed.

Introduction

One of the recurring incidents in the aviation industry is the tragic event of an airplane crash, which invariably not only leads to fatalities, suffering, and pain of victims but also triggers spontaneous reactions from diverse individuals and groups around the world (Ong and McKenzie, 2019; Ramanathan, 2016). Consequently, research on the linguistic, communicative, and discourse aspects of airplane incidents and/or accidents has been attracting a growing interest in the last couple of decades. Language studies on airplane incidents/accidents have mainly focused on the language used by airlines to communicate with stakeholders in the aftermath of a crash. In this regard, Henderson (2003) examined Singapore Airlines’ communication releases in response to the crash of its Flight SQ 006 in 2000. Labadorf (2018) studied the communication strategies used by Southwest Airlines to manage its Flight 1380 accident in 2018. Zafra and Maydell (2018) examined the crisis communication styles used by Malaysia Airlines during the disappearance and crash of its Flight MH370 in 2014. Hichri (2009) analyzed the crisis communication response to Air France’s Flight AF 447 during its disappearance and crash in 2009. Garcia-Santamaria (2010) also examined the communicative response from Spanish airline (Spanair) following the crash of its Flight 5022 in 2008. Finally, Boeing’s 737 Max experienced a series of crashes during the period 2018–2019 and a few studies (e.g., Gillings, 2025; Thompson, 2024) have examined the language and communication of the Boeing Corporation with its stakeholders in its effort to manage the crisis. A central goal of these studies is to understand how airline companies use strategic communication to manage such a crisis and to determine the impact of such communication on the public and the survival and continued operations of the companies.

A few other studies have examined how media coverage through news stories represents or reports airline disasters, including Ramanathan (2016) who explored cross-cultural influences in news reports of the Malaysian Flight MH370 disaster. Halim (2014) studied how Malaysian newspapers constructed their own meaning of the Flight MH370 disaster, and Zhang et al. (2018) examined how news frames in one news video on the Malaysian missing Flight MH370 crisis affected viewer emotions, while Jester and Dolan (2024) and Ong and McKenzie (2019) include an examination of public attitudes towards airline disasters through social media. These studies underline the fact that media discourse can present a range of perspectives and impose a variety of meanings on news items, not least when such news items are high-stake and are taken to constitute crisis situations.

Importantly, a small fraction of the studies on airline tragedies reviewed above, including Garcia-Santamaria (2010) and Ramanathan (2016), take a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach and address issues of ideology, power, and responsibility in airline crisis communication and media representation. Garcia-Santamaria (2010) examines Spanair’s communication of Flight 5022 disaster in 2008, showing how discursive strategies such as obfuscation of agency and misrepresentation of facts served to deflect institutional responsibility. Their study demonstrates how repeated lexical choices and narrative framing constructed a version of events that prioritized corporate self-preservation over transparency, contributing to public perceptions of deception and loss of trust and the airline’s eventual collapse. Ramanathan (2016) investigates news reporting on the MH370 disappearance and illustrates how ideological positioning, national interests, and cultural assumptions shaped the attribution of blame and uncertainty in crisis reporting. Garcia-Santamaria (2010) and Ramanathan’s (2016) research underscores how airplane disasters are discursively constructed through patterned linguistic choices that encode ideological meanings and shape public interpretation. While these studies examine corporate and journalistic discourse, they provide useful insights for the present study, which extends CDA inquiry to public-generated discourse by examining how ideological frames emerge, circulate, and compete in social media responses to online news of the Air India Flight 171 crash.

Given our contemporary digitalized society, such research is necessary to shed more light on the crucial role of social media discourses to enhance our understanding of how public voices can contribute to the formation of identities and social norms, thereby giving rise to ‘virtual discursive communities’ (Mitchell, 2022; Nartey and Ngula, 2025). Ideological framing is used in this paper to mean the process of presenting issues in a way that reflects a specific set of beliefs, values, or perspectives in order to shape how they are perceived and understood. The public’s reactions to airline crashes are usually spontaneous and of global interest as air travel is a global enterprise and news of a plane crash could potentially affect anyone, anywhere in the world. Hence, this article demonstrates how individuals exploit the affordances of social media to come to terms with a tragedy and make sense of a harrowing human experience as well as contributes to the scholarship on digital meaning-making in social media discourse studies.

Air India and the crash of Flight 171

Air India is India’s national airline. Founded in 1932 by J.R.D. Tata, the airline started operations as a domestic airline under the name Tata Airlines (after its founder) and launched its first international flight in 1948. With its partners, the government of India nationalized the airline in 1953 and renamed it Air India International Corporation. By 1962, the name had been shortened to Air India (AI), and the Corporation began to expand its international operations. ¹ Air India’s main hubs are in New Delhi and Mumbai, but its planes fly from other international airports in India, including Ahmedabad Airport. On June 12, 2025, Air India Flight 171 was scheduled for a routine passenger flight from Ahmedabad Airport to London (Gatwick). The aircraft was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which had been in flight service for 11 years. Flight AI171 took off at around 13: 38 (local time) in the afternoon, and less than a minute after it had just started its climb, the aircraft lost both engines and suddenly began to fall to the ground. Video footage of the final moments before the crash showed that the landing gear never retracted after the plane took off.

The plane crashed into a medical college hostel building in a densely populated suburb of Ahmedabad, just about a nautical mile away from the runway. On impact, the plane broke apart, ignited fire, and destroyed parts of the building. Aboard the plane were a total of 242 people: 230 passengers, 10 cabin crew members, and two pilots. All but one of them were killed. The sole survivor was a 40-year-old British national of Indian descent, Vishwaskumar Ramesh. The accident also killed 19 people and severely injured 67 others on the ground. The 242 people on board were made up of 169 Indian nationals (including the two pilots), 53 British, seven Portuguese, and a Canadian. The crash of Flight AI171 is reported to be one of Air India’s most tragic disasters in history, and it received media attention and public commentary across the globe.^2,3

Framing theory in discourse studies

This study is informed by framing theory, a paradigm that has received considerable attention in the social sciences. In discourse studies, the concept of framing derives from the work of Goffman (1974), who asserts that frames denote ‘schemata of interpretation’ that enable individuals ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label’ occurrences in their life and in the world at large (p. 21). That is, framing can be viewed as an individual’s organization of experience and by functioning as ‘schemata of interpretation’, frames guide perception by highlighting particular aspects of a situation, defining problems, assigning causality, making moral judgments, and suggesting solutions in order to shape a particular narrative and/or evoke specific (affective) responses. Framing theory thus suggests that the way information is presented – that is, its ‘frame’ – can influence how people understand and react to it. In discourse analysis, framing refers to the way language is exploited in structuring, presenting, and emphasizing certain aspects of reality while downplaying or omitting others (Tannen, 1993). It involves selecting specific words, phrases, expressions, metaphors, etc. to influence people’s interpretation of events or issues. Hence, it constitutes a powerful tool in communication because it can inform how people perceive and understand a situation as well as guide their opinions, emotions, and actions. From a discourse perspective, Hart (2023) describes frames at two levels: event-frames that represent patterns of experience and frames that represent specific experiences cultivated as members of a given society. Frames function ideologically in the message they accentuate or attenuate, and they involve the foregrounding and backgrounding of issues or ideas (Nartey and Yu, 2023). As Entman (1993: 52) puts it, ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’.

As a form of meaning construction, framing entails (1) frame selection, (2) frame amplification, (3) frame contestation, (4) frame bridging, and (5) frame resonance (Benford and Snow, 2000; Fairhurst and Sarr, 1996). Frame selection highlights what elements of reality are foregrounded or backgrounded in discourse, and how this includes and excludes certain voices, ideas, and interests. Frame amplification refers to the process of intensifying certain elements within a frame to make them more salient via techniques such as repetition, imagery, and emotionally charged language. Frame contestation occurs when different groups or individuals promote competing frames to influence public perception. Frame bridging refers to the connecting of two or more ideologically consistent but structurally incongruent frames regarding a particular issue, and frame resonance refers to the extent to which a particular frame aligns with existing beliefs, values, and experiences of an audience or a given society. Framing can be achieved in diverse ways, including the use of techniques such as metaphors, stories, myths, or legends, slogans, jargons, or catchphrases, artifacts or objects with intrinsic symbolic value, and rituals or ceremonies.

Benford and Snow (2000) also argue that the credibility of any framing process depends on three factors, namely frame consistency, empirical credibility, and credibility of the frame articulators. A frame’s consistency refers to the congruency between a group or a social actor’s articulated beliefs, claims, and actions. A frame’s empirical credibility refers to the supposed fit between the frame and occurrences in the real world. The credibility of the frame articulators refers to how people’s perception of frame articulators can affect the impact of a frame. The main aim of framing is to simplify reality by selecting and highlighting specific aspects of an issue with the aim of promoting a particular interpretation that can shape public perception. Consequently, the key functions of framing have been summarized in the literature as follows: problem definition, causal diagnosis, moral judgment, treatment recommendation, narrative shaping, and simplification (Benford and Snow, 2000; Entman, 1993; Tannen, 1993).

The analysis of frames, framing, and framing effects in (critical) discourse studies is important because framing plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion, uncovering power dynamics, and enhancing critical awareness and critical thinking. Consequently, framing theory has been analytically applied and empirically explored in various domains/discourses, including media (Nartey, 2021), politics (Nartey, 2024), health (Brookes and Hunt, 2021), education (Kofinti, 2025), security (MacDonald and Hunter, 2019), business (Bernard, 2020), and environment (Gellers, 2015) among others. The current study extends work in this research area by applying a framing paradigm to an emerging discourse and/or a relatively new genre – public comments in response to (social media) news on a plane crash.

Data

The data utilized for this study comprise comments by the public in reaction to online news portals that broke the news on the crash prior to the release of any official investigative reports. We focused on the public’s reactions to the breaking news because we wanted to understand the kinds of ideologies that shaped people’s thoughts and perspectives immediately the crash was reported when no official investigation had been conducted. We collected the comments from the online news portals of media outlets that published the news of the crash between June 12 and June 30, 2025, covering the period just after the crash and before any official investigative reports were released. We collected a total of 410 comments from major online news portals in India (India Today, Hindustan Times, Oneindia News), the UK (The Mirror, UNILAD, The Scottish Sun), and the US (CBS News, Daily Dot, ABC News, A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Lounge, The Wall Street Journal).

While news outlets like UNILAD and A Fly Guy’s Cabin Crew Loung may not be comparable to others like The Wall Street Journal in terms of journalistic prestige or popularity, we selected these outlets as sites of comment production rather than as comparable news institutions. Because our focus was on the analyses of ideological framing in public comments (rather than editorial positions), we did not consider the institutional prestige of the individual outlets to be analytically consequential. Also, we focused on media outlets in India, the UK, and the US because of the context of the crash. The airline was from India, the crew members and the majority of passengers were Indians, the flight’s destination was the UK whose 53 nationals were on board, and the aircraft manufacturer, Boeing Corporation, is an American company. Our decision to collect comments that responded to news stories on the crash from media houses in the aforementioned countries is not to suggest that we sought to do a comparative analysis of the comments from the three countries since the real identity and country of origin of commenters on online news cannot be realistically ascertained. Hence, we viewed our dataset as an integrated discourse on a plane crash, and we set out to highlight the ideological framing of the crash as revealed by the discursive patterns observed in the comments.

Procedure of analysis

In terms of analytical procedure, we adopted a critical discourse analytical approach (CDA), an interdisciplinary framework that seeks to raise critical consciousness about the discursive dimensions of public discourses by uncovering ideologies and social or power relations embedded in texts (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 2001). We specifically employed Fairclough’s (2003) approach to CDA which views discourse as social behavior in a dialectical relationship with other elements such as power, ideologies, identities, and institutions.

Based on Fairclough’s three-pronged approach to the analysis of texts, we first identified the main ideologies in our dataset by examining linguistic choices, text structure, and arguments. To identify the ideologies, we carefully read the data several times to familiarize ourselves with it and note down initial ideas. Some of these initial thoughts include ‘criticizing Boeing, Air India, and the pilots’, ‘accusing the Indian government’, ‘alleging institutional negligence’, ‘calling out and denigrating Indians’, ‘promoting unity in adversity’, ‘making calls for national unity’, ‘resisting racism’, ‘offering condolences’, ‘sharing messages of hope and encouragement’, ‘expressing solidarity’, etc. We grouped ideas that express a similar worldview into a broad category (i.e., a major ideology) and asked two critical discourse analysts to verify our categories and a sample of our data. They identified two areas of divergence and we discussed these disagreements before finalizing the categories. Based on the discussion, we modified our ‘nationalism’ category to ‘national belonging’ and changed ‘the helplessness of humans’ category to ‘public compassion’.

The second stage of our analysis involved interpreting the identified ideologies in relation to the context of situation (Air India’s Flight 171 crash) and the broader sociocultural, political, and historical context of airplane crashes in the aviation industry. Here, we concentrated on how the comments foregrounded certain elements to make them more salient in a bid to promote a causal interpretation of issues. In the final stage of the analysis, we explicated the implications the identified ideologies hold for social structures and people’s world conceptualization. By identifying, interpreting, and explicating the public’s framing of an international disaster like an airplane crash, this study throws further light on the essential role of language and discourse in making sense of tragic human experiences, coming to terms with harsh realities of life, and constructing various identities in challenging circumstances.

Findings and discussion

The analysis revealed three main ideologies in the public’s response to social media news on the Air India Flight 171 disaster, each of which has been discussed below.

Blame attribution

A recurring ideology in the public’s response to online news on the Air India Flight 171 crash is blame attribution – the explicit or implicit assignment of moral responsibility for problems or negative occurrences in society to individuals or groups (Simonsen, 2024). This stemmed from the public’s attempt to predict the cause of the crash based on what they saw in a short video circulated on social media after the crash. Our analysis reveals that the public attributed blame to four main sources as highlighted in Extracts 1–5: poor maintenance of the aircraft by Air India (Extract 1), (ii.) error by the pilots (Extract 2), (iii.) issues with the aircraft manufacturer or Boeing (Extract 3), sabotage (Extract 4), and a possible combination of these sources (Extract 5).

1. If the maintenance of the obvious things like the aircraft’s cabin interior and entertainment system is neglected you can bet maintenance of the more important hidden mechanical parts of the aircraft are equally shoddy.

2. Apparently it looks like the pilot in command allowed the co-pilot to airborne the aeroplane and the co-pilot did it in a hurry before the aircraft attained adequate velocity.

3. All Boeing aircraft must be IMMEDIATELY grounded forever. Why? They cannot be trusted. Safety failed!!! I will never seat [sic] inside Boeing.

4. Maybe there was someone in cockpit with pilot n co-pilot Must be the 3^rd one with pilots Did something to cause the crash.

5. If its a double engine failure then the 787 will be grounded. each aircraft has 2 engines and are both made in different factories. This reduces the problem of a double engine failure. If it happens they know what factory it was built in. If its bad maintenance the airline is held accountable. if its pilot error then they need to find out why it happened.

While the comments in Extracts 1–5 reveal the range of different attributive sources of blame for the cause of the crash, our analysis also shows that commenters used specific framing patterns and linguistic structures to foreground how they formulated a blame. The framing strategies include rationalization of the blame via a conditional clause structure ‘If the maintenance . . .’ (1), the use of epistemic modals ‘apparently’ and ‘maybe’ to hedge the blame (2, 4), and the use of the deontic modal ‘must’ to encode an obligatory tone in the blame (3). These framing techniques can be interpreted as an attempt to influence public opinion or make other members of the public believe a particular view of events (see Chong and Druckman, 2007).

In Extract 1, the commenter formulates the blame they put on Air India’s poor maintenance of the aircraft as a rational argument in a conditional clause, drawing on the pre-flight information that indicated that the cabin’s air conditioning system and entertainment devices were not functioning. Here, the commenter capitalizes on what they consider to be the truth of the information in the preceding conditional clause ‘If the maintenance of the obvious things like the aircraft’s cabin interior and entertainment system is neglected’ to induce reader ratification of their stated outcome ‘you can bet maintenance of the more important hidden mechanical parts of the aircraft are equally shoddy’. Similarly, the commenter in Extract 5 uses a series of conditional clauses to hypothesize possible causes of the crash, thereby indirectly blaming Air India, Boeing, and the pilots. In Extracts 2 and 4, however, the commenters employ hedging language via expressions such as ‘apparently’, ‘looks like’, ‘maybe’, and ‘must’ to mitigate their blame attributions. By framing their blame with these hedging devices, the commenters draw on the assumption that sharing one’s perspective on an issue in a less precise way, especially in the absence of hard facts on the issue, may not only signal one’s honesty and openness to alternative perspectives, but also tactfully facilitate the public’s endorsement of such comments. Extract 3 adopts a more assertive framing strategy, using the obligatory modal ‘must’, followed by the time adverbial in capital letters ‘IMMEDIATELY’, to blame the aircraft manufacturer Boeing. Here, the commenter first assumes the factuality of their statement and then commits readers to accept the assumed truth.

Blame attribution can be viewed as a psychological or cognitive syndrome and the act of blaming itself (or its denial) may be compulsive or out of one’s control (Wodak, 2006). It can be used to assign responsibility for negative events, position individuals or groups, and shape public opinion (Matthews, 2025). Consequently, we argue that the attribution of blame in the extracts above via diverse framing processes realizes an ideological function of making sense of tragic human experiences, coming to terms with harsh realities of life, and constructing various identities in challenging circumstances. Framing enables people to develop a particular conceptualization of an issue or reorient their thinking about an issue (Chong and Druckman, 2007). Hence, by using various framing processes to assign blame for the Air India plane crash before an official investigative report is released, the members of the public can be said to legitimize their social understanding of a disturbing phenomenon in their attempt to make sense of a situation that is difficult to understand or explain.

Apart from explicitly blaming individuals or groups for the Air India Flight 171 crash as discussed in Extracts 1–5, our analysis illustrates that other comments denied the blame attributions of other commenters. This counter discourse was expressed via two denial framing patterns: denial followed by a shifting of blame (Extracts 6 and 7) and denial followed by avoidance of blame (Extracts 8 and 9).

6. I don’t expect a pilot who has flown over 8,200 hours to make basic mistakes. I’d bet it’s the maintenance of the aircraft that’s created the problem.

7. You’ve got to feel a bit for Boeing here. Because it is Air India’s responsibility to maintain their aircraft and keep them in a safe operational state. You can’t blame the manufacturer when planes that haven’t been updated or maintained properly start to malfunction.

8. Pilot error impossible 8200 hours of flying experience by chief pilot. I think Never a pilot error. These pilots are very well trained to handle emergency situations. . .. Thorough investigation must be there in place to avoid such situation in future. We all don’t want to hear this type of tragedy again.

9. Stop “reporting” speculations. Just the facts would be really nice. Until proper investigations are done how can you people post things like this? Let the dead rest in peace.

Blame attribution is not only inevitable in situations that give rise to conflicting and competing discourses, such as in this high-stake situation of Air India’s plane crash. It is also characterized by arguments and claims that are carefully framed in support of the stances taken by commenters (Hansson, 2015; Matthews and Heesambee, 2024). We therefore contend that the patterns of straightforward blame, blame denial and shifting, and blame denial and avoidance identified in the public’s response to online news on the Air India Flight 171 crash function as an ideological discourse aimed at achieving psychological and persuasive effects. These attributions of blame and their framing do not only allow the commenters to communicate the worldview they subscribe to and want readers of their comments to accept, but also help them to cope with and/or accept the harsh reality of the disaster by providing a semblance of understanding that makes it easier to accept negative situations or outcomes.

National belonging

Several comments in response to the Air India Flight 171 crash expressed an ideology of national belonging by identifying with and/or supporting India and resisting any attempt to depict India and their airline in negative terms. Extracts 10–13 illustrate this view.

10. Don’t try to tell the mass that the pilot were doing internship with the lives of 242 peoples, seriously? I believe those pilots were professional enough, India is serious in this matters don’t be joking we need a proper and clear report.

11. There’s a script which seems to be at play. Across twitter, YouTube etc. This is being played out by Western “Pilots”. The script goes: I’m an airline pilot with X,000hrs of experience. The flaps are only slightly extended . . . They combine the two to make it into a case for pilot error.

12. In many other countries, pilot and crew details are not released to the press till the investigation is done. Some cases, not after the investigation too. It’s irony that it doesn’t work that way in our country.

13. Salute to India’s great hero captain Sumit Sabharwal. RIP! . . . Isn’t it shameful for mirror to post picture of the pilot so publicly . . . Be a responsible media.

Extracts 10–13 communicate national belonging in the form of an identity-based connection the commenters feel towards India. Using expressions such as ‘I believe those pilots were professional enough’ (10), ‘India is serious in this matters [i.e., matters of professionalism]’ (10), ‘Salute to India’s great hero captain Sumit Sabharwal’ (13), the commenters positively frame India and Indians in order to reject attempts to denigrate India in the aftermath of the crash via claims of Indian negligence or Indian inefficiency. In our dataset, several examples of accusatory and discriminatory remarks against India and Indians can be found, including ‘Air India maintenance is a joke’, ‘Well said, they [India] aren’t the best country in health and safety’, ‘Indian hygiene and maintenance is like Indian street food’, ‘Never travel on an Indian plane stink of curry and tikka masala’, and ‘India. Maintenance. Pilots. I wouldn’t shit at Boeing yet’. Some of these remarks are racist and all of them function as an othering process that alienizes and devalues Indian people (see van Dijk, 2004). Hence, by identifying with and/or supporting India as well as projecting admirable attributes of India, Extracts 10–13 can be analyzed as a nationalist discourse that identifies with a nation (here, India), supports their interests, and opposes prejudiced and discriminatory discourses directed at them. That is, the extracts convey an ideology aimed at (re)shaping the stereotypical characterization and harmful perception of Indian people.

Finlayson (1998) argues that a nationalist discourse contains a specific ‘content’ that seeks to define the general culture and values of the ‘national’ people. It also foregrounds a shared identity, a sense of communalism, and a unity of purpose (Nartey, 2023). Hence, the nationalist posture taken by the extracts can be interpreted as the use of positive framing to emphasize the positive aspects of the Indian nation in order to create a favorable impression and influence perception. This posture provides the basis for calling out what a commenter considers to be an act that does not serve India’s interest via the assertion ‘In many other countries, pilot and crew details are not released to the press till the investigation is done. Some cases, not after the investigation too. It’s irony that it doesn’t work that way in our country’ (12). Such an assertion can be analyzed as a negative-other presentation mechanism (van Dijk, 2006) that condemns what the commenter considers to be the insensitivity of the Indian media as the commenter thinks that the Indian media have publicized information that should be kept private as a sign of respect for the families of the deceased pilots and crew members. The use of ‘many other countries and ‘our country’ in the assertion is instructive because it not only achieves a contrastive function that criticizes the actions of the Indian media, but also implies that they are not devoted to the Indian nation. By presenting the Indian media as self-serving, Extract 12 suggests that they have failed to seek the interest of the Indian nation, especially during a national crisis, and hence can be indirectly considered detractors of the nation whose actions impede national unity and national integration (see Nartey, 2026).

The idea of national belonging expressed in Extracts 10–13 contributes to a sense of ‘we-ness’ and an ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ distinction (van Dijk, 2006) that pits India (and by extension the Global South) against the West (and by extension the Global North). This ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ dichotomy is explicit in Extract 11 via a commenter’s submission that there is a propagandist message that is being disseminated by self-acclaimed ‘Western pilots with X, 000hrs of experience’ who are suggesting that the crash was caused by pilot error and hence indirectly accusing the pilots (who are Indians) of ineptitude. The ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ strategy enables the commenter to counter what they perceive to be a negative portrayal of India and the Global South in general by people from the West and the Global North at large. Consequently, Extract 11 can be analyzed as a nationalist discourse that refutes a negative identity for India/Global South in order to protect the interests of this community. By resisting a pejorative depiction of India/Global South, the extract, we argue, seeks to construct and reinforce a national identity that can create a sense of shared belonging and devotion to the Indian nation and the Global South more broadly, more so when existing studies have shown that the framing of Global South crises in international affairs by the West is often rooted in hegemony and power asymmetries, colonial discourses, and stereotypes (see Henaku et al., 2024; Ratuva, 2016). That is, in exposing and opposing what a commenter believes to be a propagandist message that is being disseminated by self-acclaimed ‘Western pilots with X, 000hrs of experience’, Extract 11 can be said to frame India (and by extension the Global South) as subversive practice (Kloß, 2017). This is because the extract rejects a Western-centric, hegemonic narrative of India and promotes an alternative perspective intended to defend the reputation of India, foster solidarity among Indians and people from the Global South, and redefine global power structures.

Ong and McKenzie’s (2019) study on public attitudes towards the MH17 air tragedy in Malaysia and the UK finds that even in global tragedies and unfortunate situations of human suffering, there can be constructions of othering and marginalization. We therefore argue that the ideology of national belonging expressed in Extracts 10–13 achieves a dual purpose of promoting national unity and social cohesion among the Indian people in times of crisis as well as rejecting attempts to use discriminatory language to attack the Indian nation, devalue their airline, and denigrate their aviation industry in general. Together, the extracts highlight how language constructs and maintains a national identity, often by emphasizing certain narratives of the nation and resisting others (Guo, 2023).

Public compassion

A third ideology observed in the public’s response to online news on the Air India Flight 171 crash relates to the helplessness of humanity in the face of disasters and how this can evoke public compassion as shown in Extracts 14–18.

14. Flying is one of the safest ways to travel. But when something goes wrong, it shakes hearts across the world. Today, some are missing their father, some a mother . . . a daughter, a son, a friend . . . We don’t know their names – but we feel their pain. Let’s take a moment to pray for every soul involved, and for the families waiting with hope, or crying with pain.

15. What could the pilot have done in a situation that was out of control? The plane crashed under one minute, no reasonable time to think. My heart sank when I read about the tragic incident. May the Lord Almighty console the families of those who lost their lives. May the souls of the departed rest in peace.

16. My heart goes out to the families and loved ones of those affected by this tragic crash. May they find strength and comfort in this unbearable time.

17. Bless all the families. May they find comfort and peace. I would be going crazy but I wish all of them some comfort. Also bless that survivor and his mental status knowing he is the only one alive.

18. Such a tragic incident . . . I’m deeply sorry to hear about the plane crash and the loss of innocent lives. My thoughts and prayers are with the families who are grieving. I may be from Pakistan, but pain and loss know no borders. Humanity always comes first.

As noted in the introduction of this paper, a plane crash is a fatal occurrence. It not only causes loss of life, injury, property damage, and traumatic experiences to survivors, families, and friends, but also leaves lasting scars on people. Extracts 14–18 therefore allow members of the public to empathize with people who lost their dear ones during the Air India Flight 171 crash as well as reflect on the human condition, human limitations, and life’s unpredictability. From the extracts, it can be deduced that the discourse of compassion in the public’s response to the crash is framed in three main ways: (i) articulation of empathy and emotional support for all those affected, (ii) an expressive prayer that seeks intervention from a superior power, and (iii) a need for the incident to generate an affective feeling globally. These expressions of compassion are evident in linguistic structures such as ‘it shakes hearts across the world’ (14), ‘We don’t know their names – but we feel their pain’ (14), ‘My heart sank when I read about the tragic incident’ (15), ‘My heart goes out to the families and loved ones of those affected by this tragic crash’ (16), ‘I’m deeply sorry to hear about the plane crash and the loss of innocent lives’ (18), and ‘My thoughts and prayers are with the families who are grieving’ (18). These linguistic structures can be analyzed as empathetic expressions used to demonstrate understanding for and share other people’s feelings and experiences (Tracy and Huffman, 2016).

When the empathetic expressions mentioned above are analyzed in conjunction with prayers of supplication such as ‘Let’s take a moment to pray for every soul involved, and for the families waiting with hope, or crying with pain’ (14), ‘May the Lord Almighty console the families of those who lost their lives’ (15), ‘May [the families] find strength and comfort in this unbearable time’ (16), ‘Bless all the families. May they find comfort and peace’ (17), and ‘My thoughts and prayers are with the families who are grieving’ (18), the discourse of compassion constructed by the commenters takes on a spiritual form that highlights the helplessness of humanity and hence the need to invoke or solicit divine assistance. That is, the framing of compassion as an expressive prayer can be said to function as an appeal to a higher power to intervene on behalf of the victims of the plane crash and all those affected. It helps the commenters to, first, acknowledge their limitations as humans and their anxieties as a result of the tragic crash, and proceed to seek strength and comfort for the loved ones of the deceased through prayer, which then acts as a means by which they cultivate compassionate feelings for those affected by the disaster.

The use of a ‘heart’ metaphor in the extracts above (e.g., ‘My heart sank . . .’, ‘My heart goes out to . . .’) is instructive because it reinforces the commonly held view that the deepest feelings of humans emanate from the heart. Also, the use of first-person declarative clauses like ‘I would be going crazy, but I wish all of them some comfort’ (17) and ‘I’m deeply sorry to hear about the plane crash and the loss of innocent lives (18)’ presents the commenters’ feelings as sincere. Together, the extracts above describe the commenters’ deep emotional and psychological state and convey their sincere condolences to the victims and all those affected while hoping that their discourse of compassion will comfort the bereaved families. The expression of compassion increases in a crisis situation of human vulnerability and/or human suffering (Höijer, 2004). Hence, we contend that the articulation of compassion in Extracts 14–18 allows the commenters to come to grips with a disaster like a plane crash, try to make sense of this distressing situation, and offer hope and encouragement to those adversely affected by the disaster. The media plays a key role in the expression of compassion in public spaces for public issues; hence the notion of ‘discourses of global compassion’ (Höijer, 2004). We thus assert that the affordances of social media enable ‘ordinary’ people to share in (inter)national mourning and/or worldwide collective grief via prayers, reflections, and solemnity. We also submit that this discursive practice of admitting human imperfections and showing compassion during a national or an international disaster achieves a catharsis function that allows the public to comprehend and respond to human suffering by identifying with victims, their families and loved ones, and sometimes making a call for action or change.

Another aspect of the discourse of compassion as illustrated in Extracts 14–18 relates to how international tragedies (can) attract global empathy-cum-compassion regardless of people’s interest, race, and nationality. This is evident in pronouncements like ‘We don’t know their names – but we feel their pain’ (14) and ‘I may be from Pakistan, but pain and loss know no borders. Humanity always comes first’. (18) which underscore how persons across the globe share in the pain and suffering caused by the plane crash. These pronouncements reinforce the ideas of ‘distant suffering’ and ‘global suffering’ (Höijer, 2004; Ong and McKenzie, 2019) and highlight how the commenters solidarize with the victims of the crash and bear the pain of their dear ones regardless of whether they know them or not. The comments further underline the notion of the human condition, suggesting that it is appropriate for all persons to demonstrate humanity to others.

A useful observation we wish to highlight in the analysis of the ideological discourse of compassion in the public’s responses to online news on the Air India Flight 171 crash is the noticeable contrast between this discourse and the two ideological discourses previously discussed (i.e., blame attribution and national belonging). While the ideologies of blame attribution and national belonging present critical views on the crash that are framed with competing discourses, including discursive othering and ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ distinctions (van Dijk, 2006), the ideology of public compassion is framed as a one-sided progressive discourse (Hughes, 2018). That is, in expressing compassion towards victims and loved ones of the plane crash, the analysis demonstrates that commenters only focus on empathy, love, support, etc., and do not engage in controversial or competing discourses (of the kind discussed in the discourses of blame attribution and national belonging).

This finding of a one-sided progressive discourse on public compassion reveals the public’s somewhat universal acceptance of the importance of giving emotional support to all those affected by the news of a plane crash (or some other tragedy) and confirms Höijer’s (2004: 518) view that compassion discourses are characterized by what she calls ‘hegemonic unity’. We interpret the contrast between the ideology of compassion on the one hand and the ideologies of blame attribution and national belonging on the other hand as a distinction between a progressive discourse aimed at those (in)directly affected by the plane crash (i.e., victims, survivors, and their relatives and loved ones) and a contested discourse directed at key stakeholders of the aviation industry (i.e., airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and governments/regulatory bodies).

Conclusion

This article has examined the ideological frames that characterized public comments in response to online news on the Air India Flight 171 crash. The analysis identified three main ideologies – blame attribution, national belonging, and public compassion – used by members of the public to make sense of the tragedy and to come to terms with it. Together, they enabled members of the public to select and highlight specific aspects of the tragedy (especially the role of the airline, aircraft manufacturer, pilots, and media) in their attempt to promote a particular interpretation that can influence public perception. That is, by framing the plane crash using certain ideologies, the members of the public exploited their language to structure, present, and emphasize certain aspects of their perceived reality while downplaying or omitting others in order to provide a particular problem definition, encourage or discourage certain interpretations, and make recommendations for issues surrounding the plane crash.

This study confirms previous work that found that even in discourses on global tragedies and unfortunate situations of human suffering, there can be constructions of othering and marginalization (see Ong and McKenzie, 2019). Therefore, there is a need for continued discursive work in cultural and media studies in diverse sociocultural contexts to promote critical awareness about the power of language use to shape people’s perception of and attitudes to complex social issues (see Nartey and Ladegaard, 2021). That is, the more people become aware of the inspiring or damaging impact of their discourses (especially in online spaces) due to continued discursive work, there is a greater likelihood for positive social change. Another key finding of the study is that while the ideologies of blame attribution and national belonging were framed with competing discourses, the ideology of public compassion was framed as a one-sided progressive discourse. This highlights the public’s awareness of the crucial role of language as a resource for wellbeing. That is, the people who commented on social media news on the Air India Flight 171 disaster are acutely aware that their text, discourse, or languaging can have positive or negative emotional/mental consequences; hence the need to use it to offer comfort and encouragement in times of crisis.

As noted at the outset of this study, linguistic research on airplane incidents/accidents have mainly focused on the language used by airlines to communicate to the public and other stakeholders in the aftermath of a plane crash. As there is little research on the kinds of ideologies that underline public comments in response to (social media) news on a plane crash, the current study contributes to crisis communication research from the perspective of the public/masses. By so doing, the article sheds more light on the crucial role of social media discourses to enhance our understanding of how public voices can contribute to the formation of identities and social norms in online spaces, possibly influencing public perception and national sentiment. By focusing on the public’s response to social media news on a plane crash (rather than an organization’s response), the study extends research on digital meaning-making in social media discourse studies by offering insights into how people exploit the affordances of social media to construct or resist identities, foreground or background specific worldviews, and represent themselves and others in the aftermath of an international tragedy. The study also demonstrates how language use intersects with unpleasant elements of social life such as tragedies, disasters, or crises. It therefore illuminates the view that language/discourse is a primary tool for sense-making since it is fundamental to how humans perceive, interpret, and organize their experiences. Furthermore, this article extends research on discursive framing by analyzing an emerging discourse and/or a relatively new genre that has hardly being explored from a discursive framing perspective.