Memetic impact – A reception study of memetic and textual posts
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | This study focuses on the use of memes on social media and the posters’ representation and the reception they receive. It looks at posts regarding certain polarizing issues and, using sentiment analysis, determines whether the usage of memetic elements evokes more positive sentiments from the audience. The research takes into account posts from the social media platform X and compares pairs by the same poster on the same topic in order to retain a similar baseline of presumed popularity of the contribution. The study then looks into how these pairs (of which one is textual and one memetic) are perceived by the public – if the memetic element evokes more positive responses than the textual one. A sample size of the reactions is subjected to sentiment analysis using manual qualitative evaluation using contextual cues. The overall sentiment values, determined from a few such pairs of posts, then portray whether the tactic of using memetic elements to engage the crowd and skew the opinion on polarizing topics is successful in these instances. In addition, the project also includes a small point of interest for the study of artificial intelligence. An AI tool has been asked to perform the same analysis and its results are compared to the manual process, demonstrating the accuracy of such tools for the purposes of conducting sentiment analysis. By the examination of the data, the project gives insight into representation manipulation on social media and the power of memetic elements as communication units in digital environments. |
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