<![CDATA[Social media comment sections have become important multimodal spaces where users communicate emotions and evaluations through the combination of written language and visual elements. Although previous studies have examined multimodal communication in TikTok comments, most have focused on humor, sarcasm, cyberbullying, or visual language, while the semiotic construction of second-hand embarrassment remains underexplored. Therefore, this study aims to identify the verbal and visual signs found in TikTok comments and analyze how these signs construct the meaning of second-hand embarrassment. This study employed a descriptive qualitative approach by analyzing ten purposively selected comments responding to a Stranger Cat Official TikTok video that recompiles several older, previously well-received clips into a single upload, using Saussure's theory of the sign and Barthes' theory of signification. The findings reveal that verbal signs alone rarely communicate second-hand embarrassment explicitly; instead, their meanings are completed and reinforced by accompanying visual signs, including memes, reaction images, stickers, and photographs. At the denotative level, the comments and images describe observable reactions to the video, whereas at the connotative level they construct meanings of vicarious discomfort through irony, exaggeration, avoidance, bodily responses, and symbolic visual expressions. The study concludes that second-hand embarrassment in TikTok comment sections is constructed through the interaction of verbal and visual signs, demonstrating that emotional expression in social media is fundamentally multimodal and cannot be fully interpreted by analyzing either mode independently.]]>
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