The Changing Discourse of YouTube’s About Us Page

The paper examines the evolving discourse of YouTube’s About Us page through a multimodal linguistic lens. It analyzes two iterations of the page (2019-2021 and 2021-present) in comparison with TikTok’s corresponding section, tracing how corporate self-representation is linguistically and visually constructed across time. The About Us page is approached as a multimodal genre (Garzone and Catenaccio 2021; Petroni 2020) in which linguistic, visual and compositional resources combine to construct corporate ethos and discursive identity. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 2007 [1975]; 1978), Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005), and Multimodal Ideational Mapping (Moschini 2022), the study focuses on the ideational metafunction as the axis through which experience is represented and specific worldviews are naturalized. Multimodal Ideational Mapping (MIM) is employed as an interpretive framework to trace how ideational meanings are distributed across language, image and layout, and how recurrent conceptual nuclei emerge through their intersemiotic alignment. By reinstating Halliday’s notion of context of culture as a historical and ideational environment, the analysis connects local semiotic choices to broader cultural scripts that inform platform self-representation. The findings suggest that YouTube’s corporate discourse underwent a partial reorientation after the global diffusion of TikTok in 2020: from a participatory and civic-oriented rhetoric associated with the Californian Ideology (Turner 2006; Barbrook and Cameron 1996) toward a mode of self-presentation increasingly grounded in aesthetic pleasure and emotional engagement.