Impoliteness has become a crucial aspect of digital communication, particularly on social media platforms such as Instagram. Despite the vast expansion of online discourse, research on gender-based differences in impoliteness strategies remains limited, especially in the context of English comments on Instagram’s broadcast pages. This study fills this gap by examining the impoliteness strategies employed by female and male’ Instagram users. For doing this study, a corpus of 520 comments (17,850 words) posted by 256 female and 264 male users on CNN, BBC, Fox News, and The New York Times Instagram pages between 2022 and 2025 based on Culpeper’s (2011) five impoliteness strategies was analyzed. After coding and analyzing comments, a Chi-square test was conducted to determine the significance of gender differences. Results indicated that the bald-on-record strategy was the most frequently used strategy (29.9%), and withholding politeness was the least frequent (11.81%). The results of this study also revealed that, although females exhibited a slightly higher usage of negative impoliteness strategy (19.90%) than males (18.79%), the overall gender differences in the employment of impoliteness strategies were not statistically significant. These findings showed that impoliteness on Instagram is influenced more by platform norms than by gender differences. The study highlights the importance of understanding impoliteness in online discourse for language instructors, online communicators, and digital content developers. For future studies, researchers can explore nonverbal cues, cultural differences, and the evolving nature of impoliteness strategies across multiple social media platforms to gain a more comprehensive understanding of gender and online discourse.
Norouzi et al. (2025) studied this question.