Redrawing the lines of veracity in the Sharpiegate affair: “Pre-truth” claims in a Post-truth order

Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump's deselection

“…As users kept adding their own and reusing each other's material, cursing extended into online contexts where the functions of distinct platform artifacts 'become indistinct in the flow of […] memetic riffing' (Pilipets, 2023: 111-12). Here, 'curse quoting' Trump might have been a means of throwing his own fake news back at him, just as it might have been a deliberate attempt at spamming (Parikka and Sampson, 2009), a tactic of affective reversal (Griffin, 2021), an act of political jamming (Pentzold et al, 2022), or a form of trollish amusement 'for the lulz' (Phillips, 2015). As we argue below, it is against this background that Trump's faux announcement gave rise to social theatre where users performed wit and flair, improvising and rerouting each others' comments in surprising directions as they went along.…”

“…By discussing the vernacular dynamics (Burgess, 2006;Gibbs et al, 2015;Tuters, 2021) of attention-hijacking and nonsense-making (Katz and Shifman, 2017;Pentzold et al, 2022) in users' responses to Trump, the following sections first address the Twitter event's context and its specific performative aspects. We then unpack our methods in order to make sense of the relations between Armenian curses and 'cursed images'.…”