How is the War between Russia and Ukraine Depicted on Twitter? Rhetorical Analysis of the Most Popular Memes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2023.26.2.8Keywords:
Communication, Internet, social media, public opinion, audience participationAbstract
Parallel to the representations of the media, memes have become a powerful tool for Internet users to convey opinions and express emotions about war, giving rise to an unexpected communication phenomenon: talking about this fact with humor, despite the thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people. Given their persuasive nature and exponential dissemination, memes contribute to creating public opinion and social reality. Thus, this study aims to decipher and describe the meanings that predominate in the most popular memes about this event and identify their emotional or cognitive intention, rhetoric and style of humor, purpose, and, in the case of memes considered harmful, their objectives and audience to which the harm is targeted. From a rhetorical and content analysis performed on the ten most popular memes on Twitter, we found that these have a high moral content: they point out the mistakes of others. Criticism is directed at Latin America, Putin, the Western media, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The predominant emotion and intention are fear and social criticism. The intertextual character of memes implies three degrees of semantic dependency. These results show that behind apparently innocuous humor, there are ideologies, perspectives, and social criticism that find support in the network.
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