Abstract
This chapter evaluates the differences in humorous content found on Twitter versus other social media sites during the 2016 presidential election. A content analysis of 700 humorous still images, memes, and cartoons demonstrates slight differences between the social media information environments. Humorous images in the Twitterverse tended to be slightly more partisan, invoke slightly more masculine stereotypes in portrayals of candidates, and were less likely to use emotionally evocative content. On both Twitter and elsewhere, humorous still images consisted largely of attacks and were relatively devoid of policy information. The results are explained in light of the nature of Twitter as a social media platform, specifically its character delimitation for text and the news orientation of its user base.
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Notes
- 1.
It is true that some people have found ways to post longer treatises on Twitter, by indicating that they will use multiple tweets as a thread, or to write a longer passage and to take a screen shot of it and attach it as an image file. Still, Twitter largely does not suffer the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) problem of other social media platforms.
- 2.
Apologies to Thomas Hobbes.
- 3.
Humorous images outnumbered non-humorous images by a ratio of 5:1. The non-humorous images were found to be largely similar to the humorous images across all variables and were removed from the analysis in order to focus exclusively on humorous images, maintaining consistency for the proposed hypotheses.
- 4.
Yes, some of these are horribly sexist and offensive.
- 5.
TinEye.com was found to be more reliable than other reverse-lookup programs such as Google, which resulted in a great deal of false-positive identifications.
- 6.
For a sample size of n = 740, the p < .10 threshold attained here could be considered significant.
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The author is indebted to Madison Ferris, Ananya Hariharan, Tyler Hoffman, and Sarah Momsen-Jones for research assistance.
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Belt, T.L. (2018). Can We at Least All Laugh Together Now? Twitter and Online Political Humor During the 2016 Election. In: Galdieri, C., Lucas, J., Sisco, T. (eds) The Role of Twitter in the 2016 US Election. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68981-4_7
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