<![CDATA[Politeness research in digital discourse has predominantly focused on linguistic strategies, giving limited attention to how multimodal resources and pragmatic inference interact in the construction of evaluative meaning in social criticism. This gap is particularly salient on social media platforms, where criticism of public issues is often conveyed through indirect, symbolically mediated forms that require audiences to infer meaning from integrated linguistic, visual, and contextual cues. To address this gap, this study investigates the discursive-integrative politeness strategy in social media discourse on social criticism, examining how users negotiate the interpersonal dimension, evaluative stance, and structural critique through indirect communicative strategies. Employing a qualitative descriptive research design within a pragmatic discourse-analytic framework, this study analyzes a purposively selected corpus of 120 textual and video-based posts on economic inequality, government performance, environmental degradation, and unresolved human rights issues on Instagram and TikTok. The findings reveal that social criticism is frequently expressed in indirect forms such as parody, irony, rhetorical questioning, sarcasm, empathetic narration, and symbolic comparison. These communicative resources function as ostensive cues that enable audience members to infer evaluative meanings by integrating linguistic, visual, and contextual information. The study suggests that discursive-integrative politeness enables the expression of criticism in socially acceptable ways while preserving critical engagement with public issues. Though limited to a relatively small corpus from two social media platforms, the study contributes to politeness theory by demonstrating how multimodal meaning-making and inferential processes interact in the circulation of social criticism in digital public discourse. These findings have implications for understanding how digital platforms shape the negotiation of politeness, critique, and public participation in contemporary media environments.]]>
