Dynel Marta, Zappavigna Michele
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Department of Creative Communication, 01132, Lithuania.
The University of New South Wales, School of Arts and Media, Australia.
Discourse Context Media. 2023 Apr;52:100670. doi: 10.1016/j.dcm.2023.100670. Epub 2023 Feb 2.
Despite the abundance of research into conspiracy theories, including multiple studies of Covid-19 conspiracy theories in particular, user reactions to conspiracy theories are an underexplored area of social media discourse. This study aims to fill this gap by examining a dataset of humorous responses to proliferating COVID-19 conspiracy theories based on a corpus of tweets bearing the pejorative hashtag #CovidConspiracy. We report the complex orchestration of heteroglossic discursive voices in these posts to reveal their rhetorical function, oriented towards expressing a negative stance and, in some cases, amounting to ridicule. The discursive effects of this interplay of voices entail imitation, parody, mockery and irony on the micro level, while on the interactional (macro) level, anti-conspiracy tweets jointly enact what we dub "polyvocal scorn". It expresses multiple users' trenchant critique and contempt for conspiracy theories, while the humour of the tweets serves to display the users' wit and superiority over conspiracy theorists.
尽管对阴谋论进行了大量研究，尤其是对新冠阴谋论的多项研究，但用户对阴谋论的反应是社交媒体话语中一个未得到充分探索的领域。本研究旨在通过基于带有贬义标签#CovidConspiracy的推文语料库，研究对不断扩散的新冠阴谋论的幽默回应数据集来填补这一空白。我们报告了这些帖子中异质话语声音的复杂编排，以揭示它们的修辞功能，其目的是表达负面立场，在某些情况下还带有嘲讽意味。这种声音互动的话语效果在微观层面表现为模仿、戏仿、嘲笑和讽刺，而在互动（宏观）层面，反阴谋推文共同营造出我们称之为“多声轻蔑”的氛围。它表达了多个用户对阴谋论的尖锐批评和蔑视，而推文的幽默则展示了用户的机智以及相对于阴谋论者的优越感。
