Politics, jokes, and banter amid tragedy

The use of sarcasm and mocking on social media in response to the Uvalde school shooting

Authors

  • Paul Bleakley University of New Haven
  • Daniel Sailofsky Middlesex University

Keywords:

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

Abstract

The mass shooting in May 2022 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was another reminder of the tragic impact of gun violence in the United States of America. As happens in the aftermath of such incidents, the Uvalde shooting prompted robust public discourse around not just the event itself, but the causes and potential solutions to gun violence. In this article, we examine a somewhat unusual element of this 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.

Author Biographies

Paul Bleakley, University of New Haven

Assistant Professor in Criminal Justice

Daniel Sailofsky, Middlesex University

Lecturer in Criminology

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Published

2023-12-31

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2023): Journal of Social Media in Society

Section

Articles

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