Laughs in the stream: Discourse and networks in Twitter parody accounts

This paper examines Twitter parody accounts focused on the Arab world from both a sociolinguistic and a sociotechnical perspective. It contends that the design of Twitter and the way Twitter integrates parody accounts, official accounts, and accounts of everyday citizens fosters a computer-mediated form of parody significantly different from previous forms of parody in terms of both performance and audience. Within this context, this study investigates the discourse and conversation features of tweets from such parody accounts as well as the networks they perform within and to.

Data is drawn from almost two hundred parody accounts collected since January 2011. Parody accounts focusing on the Arab world have proliferated ever since the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution triggered popular protests across the Middle East and North Africa. While most perform a character based on a specific real-life individual, others parody a particular state media service, and still others personify more amorphous groups, such as baltagiya (governmental thugs) or mokhabarat (intelligence services), without situating these in a specific region or regime. Accounts vary in terms of frequency of tweets, content of tweets, language and script choices, types of interlocutors, and target audiences.

This study first asks, what are the characteristic elements of a tweet from a parody account? Within this context are examined linguistic codes, speech acts, hashtag indexing, inclusion of hypertext, and popularity (measured through retweets). Second, this study investigates the composition of parody accounts’ networks through: 1. Analysis of public “conversations” formed by directed tweets (messages addressed to specific Twitter accounts; these may be other parody accounts, official accounts, or neither); and 2. Examination of follower patterns and how they change. The paper concludes with a brief description of how the design of Twitter itself grants a certain parity of authority to tweets from parody accounts.