Humor As a Means of Manipulating a Social Group’s Opinion in Modern Online Communities (A Case-Study on ‘the Houses of’ 2ch and Pikabu)

Abstract

The Internet is a communication space where newly formed communities search for ways to reflect on their social nature. We provide a theoretical background to demonstrate how the humor was used to manipulate social groups before the rise of mass media and after it. We use Critical Discourse Analysis and pragmatics to study several cases of social manipulation with the help of humor. The two Internet communities, 2ch and Pikabu, being among the largest Russian-speaking entertainment communities, often compete and use humor as a way to manipulate their representatives for social purposes: to consolidate, fight back, reflect on their community's norms and values. Our research shows that these communities follow the old traditions of humor and laughter to organize the poorly regulated information space. Although 2chers tend to use trolling more often, there are no general differences between these communities in how they use humor to manipulate their social group.

COVID-19 humor in Jordanian social media: A socio-semiotic approach

“…El Khachab (2017), for instance, investigated the use of humor in certain cases within Egyptian social media and how real-life political events are transformed into exaggerated fictions by virtue of humor. While Mikhalkova et al (2020) examined, through pragmatics, how humor in mass media can manipulate the audience and change the social opinion. El Khachab's and Mikhalkova's studies, among several, demonstrate how humor is deployed in social media studies.…”