The murder of George Floyd, an African American, by police officers in Minneapolis, USA in 2020 raised the #blackouttuesday hashtag and Black Lives Matter (BLM) posts on social media such as Instagram. People all over the world uploaded a pitch black picture with the hashtag, including the world's top actress Emma Watson. Many people (netizens) have left comments on her post since then. They conveyed their thoughts and views about the case. In other words, netizens expressed their attitude towards BLM through the comments. This research will examine how netizens’ attitudes on Watson’s post about BLM are realized by employing Appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics framework (Martin and White, 2005). The research focuses on analyzing Appraisal - Attitude elements namely Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation in the comments of Watson’s post on June 3rd 2020. This research used a qualitative descriptive method. The results of analysis reveal that Affect deals with the netizens’ emotional reaction towards BLM case, Judgment with Watson’s support to BLM movement, and Appreciation with netizens’ evaluation towards BLM movement. This research also suggests that netizens need to be wiser in expressing their point of view towards a particular issue when posting on Instagram or leaving a comment on Instagram posts.

Keywords: appraisal, attitude, BLM, Instagram, Systemic Functional Linguistics