Taking sides on Twitter/X by using GIFs and images regarding emotionally conflictive situations
What is it about?
This paper analises the replies given to a Twitter account that reposts "Am I the asshole" situations, where users ask others to express whether they or someone else behaved reprehensively. More specifically, we focused on replies that used GIFs and images to take a stance regarding the actions described in the posts.
Why is it important?
Social media have currently become one of the main contexts in which people socialise with each other. This paper focuses on the affordances provided by Twitter, particularly the use of GIFs and images, to analyse the complexity of the replies given to morally charged situations. This kind of detailed multimodal analysis, which accounts for both text and images, is shown to be crucial to understand the complexity of the replies, which are, in turn, one more form of human communication.