Citation

Bleakley P, Sailofsky D. J. Soc. Media Soc. 2023; 12(2): 62-81.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Tarleton State University-Fort Worth)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

The mass shooting in May 2022 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, served to reinforce the serious impact of gun violence in the United States of America. As typically occurs in the aftermath of these events, the Uvalde shooting prompted robust public discourse around not just the incident itself, but the causes and potential solutions to gun violence. In this article, we conduct a novel examination of an aspect of the post-mass shooting discourse: the use of sarcasm and mocking to convey partisan arguments on social media. Using a dataset of 2,182 Twitter replies to mainstream media posts about the case (n=14), this research isolates sarcastic and mocking tweets to assess prevalence, as well as the specific characteristics of the dark humor observed. The relationship between political ideology and sarcastic and/or mocking rhetoric is discussed, as is the connection between pre- established 'disaster scripts' and sarcastic responses to the same on social media.

Keywords: mass shootings, school shootings, social media, sarcasm, dark humor, Twitter, X, disaster scripts, police, gun control, gun violence

Language: en