Analyzing reception of censorship crisis on Twitter in multimodal posts
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The presented project observes a current crisis regarding censorship on the social media micro-blogging platform Twitter, stemming from its purchase by Elon Musk finalized on the 28th of October 2022 (Zahn, 2022). The issues arising on the platform gave rise not only to a lot of outrage, but also to new opportunities to study creative use of multimodal elements and their reception. This project analyzes two posts made by Elon Musk with multimodal elements (namely memes) from the perspective of poster representation and reception. The first post dates to before Musk’s ownership of Twitter while the second was made after. The study employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods of multimodal discourse analysis to uncover the findings. The qualitative analysis of the two posts is based on contextual elements, concepts such as humor, multimodality, celebrity identity online and power, or Van Dijk’s ideological square (1998). The study uses Wiggins’s elaborated model of meme dimensions (2019), based on Limor Shifman’s introduced dimensions of form, content and stance (2013), to observe the elements contributing to Musk’s representation via memes both before and after the ownership of Twitter. The qualitative analysis, which considers 150 responses from each post, then demonstrates how Musk’s representation was received by the wider audience based on lexical and contextual cues, with the employment of a custom classification of the dataset, among other including positive responses, negative ones and ones that refer to Musk’s wealth and business ventures. The quantitative study provides a point of comparison for the reception of the personage both before and after the censorship crisis. The study shows whether and how the rise of censorship on the platform affected communication, specifically in regards to the person considered responsible for it. |
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