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The Mail Carrier is tearing up Ballots: Irony Discourse on Weird-Twitter

Daniil Eliseev

The College of William & Mary

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Introduction

Discourse on social media, particularly in some loosely defined groups on Twitter such as left-

Twitter and/or weird-Twitter, often include instances of irony that, according to Farias et al., are

interpreted un-ironically by some users as an unexpected polarity reverser (2016, pg. 19:1). Members of

weird/left-Twitter often use accounts that are anonymous and disconnected from the users real identity

and post or create content absurd in nature and typically left-leaning on the political spectrum, making

references to both politics as well as memes that circulate throughout the community. Within these

Twitter communities, harsh or radical statements are generally understood to be interpreted through a lens

of hyperbolic satire or irony. However, when brash statements are made by an account known to be

ironic, users unfamiliar with the account or unfamiliar with the norms of interaction within this particular

group on Twitter often take their tweets at face-value and, as will be discussed in this paper, this

sometimes leads to extreme accusations based on statements or posts that were never intended to be

thought of as real or serious.

These kinds of misunderstandings or misinterpretations of irony serve to contrast members of the

in-group within the weird/left-Twitter with people from the out-group who stumble upon an ironic post

because of its virility, due to Twitters public, one-to-many capacity of communicating (Page 2012, pg.

94). This paper will analyze a specific instance of an ironic Tweet from this Twitter community and how

interactions with users who take a Tweet at face value solidify the in-group.

Background

The various mediums of social media, in this case Twitter, can obscure ironic gestures and

statements that might more easily be indexed in spoken, face-to-face discourse with the aid of body

language, gesture, register, and tone of speech. It can sometimes be difficult for people unfamiliar with

mediums like Twitter to identify a statement as being either sincere or ironic. Farias et al. developed a

model through which irony in Tweets could be detected with relatively high accuracy (2016). Variables

considered include structural features like punctuation, length of words, emoticons, discourse markers,
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part of speech, and semantic similarity as well as affective features such as a dictionary of affective

language as well as semantic lexicon (Farias et al. 2016, pg. 19:8-9).

Page importantly describes the difference between front and back stage performance on Twitter,

which ironic Twitter users exploit for absurd comedic effect (2012, pg. 105). Typically, this means

putting a false or exaggerated statement that one typically wouldnt share on an open and public platform

on the front stage. These ironic tweets utilize the front stage as described by Page and are indexed by the

ironic Twitter features described by Farias et al.

Methodology

In this analysis, irony will be the term used to describe interactions that are ironic in the

traditional sense as well as instances of sarcasm and hyperbole that, though not technically ironic, are

often grouped either with or as a part of irony perceptually by this group. Specifically, this analysis will

look at irony and ironic discourse through a lens that places emphasis on the speakers dissociative

attitude towards the content of the utterance while also looking closely to the reactions and responses to

the Tweet being analyzed through the Gricean tradition of taking into account the role of the literal

interpretation of the utterance (Kapogianni 2015, pg. 16).

Farias et al. attempt to predict the ironic nature of a tweet by comparing and contrasting two

feature groups, structural and affective, believed to contain relevant variables in ironic tweets (Farias et al.

2016, pg. 19:9-10). For the sake of brevity this analysis will only consider the implications of structural

features. The structural features that will be analyzed, taken from Farias et al. (2015, pg. 19:10), will be as

follows:

PM: The frequency of a punctuation mark in a tweet

lengthChars: total amount of characters in a tweet

upperCaseChars: total amount of uppercase characters in a tweet

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The frequency of these features will be counted and tallied per tweet as well as averaged out for

frequency in both ironic and non-ironic tweets. These are relevant factors because they are strong

constraints in the medium of Twitter, which only allows 140 characters per tweet. On Twitter, a

difference of only a few minor structural features can even go so far as to index an identity or solidarity

within a group. This analysis will propose that low frequency of these structural features indexes an in-

group identity for weird/left-Twitter and that the lack of serious, more formal grammar also helps the

index that a given statement is not meant to be taken seriously.

This analysis will assume that every reply from the user who posted the original ironic tweet will

also be ironic and that the selected replies from other users in these data, who are critical of the content of

the tweet, are non-ironic due to their serious interpretation of the ironic tweet. This analysis will seek to

find whether or not a correlation or level of predictability exists between these factors. The prediction of

this analysis is that non-ironic tweets will have a higher PM frequency, a greater lengthChars, and a

greater frequency of upperCaseChars per tweet reply and that these structural features can be used to

predict whether or not a tweet is ironic.

Discussion

The following tweet is from the account of a left-Twitter or weird-Twitter user, @randygdub,

on October 16-17, 2016. The original tweet and the replies to it are in response to hysteria during the

2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The concern satirized in the

Tweet, expressed by the Trump campaign and his followers but unsubstantiated due to lack of evidence,

posited that the Democratic Party and the government would commit voter fraud during the election in

favor of Clinton, particularly during early and absentee voting. Though taken as a serious accusation,

Democrats and liberals quickly dismissed the notion as unfounded but with a cautious respect for the

gravity of such a claim.

Some members of left-Twitter, however, decided to dismiss the notion of a rigged election by

using irony to call out the absurdity of the claim and, through a performance on Twitter, @randygdub

satirized a caricature of a postal worker tearing up absentee ballots for Trump to demonstrate how
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ludicrous the idea is. Democratic politicians and supporters share a similar sentiment with @randygdub

and the users of left-Twitter, but the method of ironic posting used by @randygdub is far from the

methods of reaction used by liberal politicians, who would have almost certainly been viewed as being

unprofessional if they had made the same ironic claims. In this sense, the expectations of genre come into

play, and irony is not included in the genre of political speech. However, within weird/left-Twitter, irony

is an important feature of the genre most acceptable in the medium. Ironic tweets from weird/left-Twitter

have predictable patterns in structure that help index their nature, but some users fail to either

semantically or structurally detect the irony.

The following tweets will be counted so as to determine each replys PM, lengthChars, and

upperCaseChars. It should be noted that portions of tweets that are quoted, such as in thread 3, will not be

considered in the tweets PM, lengthChars, or upperCaseChars so that we can isolate the discourse of the

utterances phrased by each speaker:

@randygdub: I love working at the post office in Columbus, Ohio and ripping up absentee ballots
that vote for trump
PM: 1
lengthChars: 103
upperCaseChars:3

Thread 1
@itsJumps: and now youre going to get arrested, have fun?
PM: 2
lengthChars: 46
upperCaseChars: 0

@randygdub: for what

PM: 0
lengthChars: 8
upperCaseChars: 0

@itsJumps: isnt that kinda Illegal?

PM: 5
lengthChars: 25
upperCaseChars: 1

@randygdub: maybe in your state

PM: 0
lengthChars: 19
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upperCaseChars: 0

Thread 2
@FredPiccoloJr: @randygdub: I love working at the post office in Columbus,Ohio and ripping up
absentee ballots that vote for trump attn @USPS
PM: 1
lengthChars: 12
upperCaseChars: 0*
*though @USPS contains uppercase characters, it will not be considered as part of the
discourse of this user, since it is being used to tag another user whose handle name is in
capitalized characters.

@USPSHelp: The Postal Service has completed an initial investigation of the mentioned tweets and does
not be[contd via link: lieve these tweets were made by a postal employee.]
PM: 4
lengthChars: 99
upperCaseChars: 3

@randygdub: thanks for covering for me

PM: 0
lengthChars: 26
upperCaseChars: 0

Thread 3
@Sparkleaffect: How do you know they are voting for Trump arent they sealed? If so, then youre
admitting that you open peoples mail?
PM: 5
lengthChars: 119
upperCaseChars: 3

@randygdub: yeah but you can do that if you work at the post office
PM: 0
lengthChars: 55
upperCaseChars: 0

@sparkleaffect: so youre taking peoples right to vote away from them??

PM: 4
lengthChars: 56
upperCaseChars: 0

@randygdub: no just trump voters

PM: 0
lengthChars: 20
upperCaseChars: 0

Thread 4
@o4america: You violated Federal Law. Heres the link from Cornell Law Library. Your prison name
will be Ben Dover [link to mentioned US code]
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PM: 3
lengthChars: 103
upperCaseChars: 10

@randygdub: no its cool the attorney general gave me permission

PM:1
lengthChars: 52
upperCaseChars: 0

The frequencies of the rate of PM, lengthChars, and upperCaseChars vary greatly

between the tweets of @randygdub and those replying to him. Once averaged, it becomes clear

that the frequency of structural features serve as a relatively good way of predicting whether or

not a tweet, at least within this context, is ironic:

Average of Structural Features per Tweet

@randygdub:
PMAvg:0.23
lengthCharsAvg: 40.4
upperCaseCharsAvg: 0.43

non-ironic users:
PMAvg: 3.43
lengthCharsAvg: 65.7
upperCaseCharsAvg: 2.57

Though a high frequency of all features analyzed suggest a non-ironic tweet and a low

frequency of features suggest an ironic tweet, certain features matter more. The difference in

lengthCharsAvg between ironic and non-ironic tweets is only a 62.6% increase whereas the the

increase in upperCaseCharsAvg is about 6 times as frequent and the increase in PMAvg

frequency between ironic and non-ironic tweets is almost 15 times more frequent.

Some of the tweets may have skewed the data, however. Specifically, the tweets in

threads 4 and 2 include links that may change the way that factors are realized in the data,

specifically character count. For this reason this analysis does not count quotes or linked tweets,

since the characters in a link comprise a semantic and interactive object and because quoted
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speech, though it constitutes discourse, does not constitute the environment of individual

discourse being studied.

More perplexing than linked tweets are tweets from official government organizations

rather than unverified users. These accounts, notably @USPSHelp, adhere to the expectation of

formal speech even on a less-formal medium like Twitter. @USPSHelps character count was

tallied, but became ambiguous because the tweet ends with a link to an official United States

Postal Service page that continues the statement as a way of subverting Twitters 140 character

limitation. The structural factors of personal accounts making non-ironic tweets followed a

similar frequency of features to the official USPS account, implying that the frequency of those

certain factors constitute a genre of either authority or seriousness on a more casual platform.

This also serves as a way for ironic users of Twitter to easily identify those who are privy to

jokes and those who are replying with serious concern that an ironic tweet might be real.

Though this analysis deviates strongly from Farias et al.s interpretation of irony into a

broader definition, it does corroborate the use of structural features to determine whether or not a

tweet is ironic (2016, pg. 19:17-18). With relevance to Page, @randygdub and other users of

weird/left-Twitter exploit the understanding of the platform as a front stage performance by

including ironic statements that one would assume would never be publically or willingly shared

on an open platform in order to achieve the effect of absurdist humor, and their structural

features serve to guide the semantic interpretation of a particular tweet as being ironic (2012, pg.

105).

Conclusion

The replies to this tweet that misinterpret its irony garnered real world effects. News

media covered the misinterpretation (Wiegel 18 October 2016) and, as seen in the data, an

official inquiry by the USPS was conducted. Users who took the tweet to be real did not pick up
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on the semantic or structural indexes of irony, which confused them and immediately identified

them as outsiders to the weird/left-Twitter community. The frequencies of structural features

suggests that, above all, frequency of punctuation and capitalization predominantly differentiates

ironic tweets from non-ironic tweets as a way to differentiate the in-group from the out-group on

viral tweets from weird/left-Twitter other than semantic understanding of a tweet being ironic.

Though the number of characters in a tweet were also correlated, they were too similar to say

with strong certainty that they were related. Due to the nature of Twitter as a medium with

constraints on the number of characters and the fact that the differences between character count

in ironic and non-ironic tweets are so similar, the average number of characters cannot be

considered as strong of a predictive factor in determining the ironic nature of a tweet.

For further research, more information should be gathered from a larger corpus in order

to create a large enough data set to see if these kinds of frequencies are apparent in the ironic

tweets of other users of weird/left-Twitter. Further research would also highly benefit from

analyzing tweets with features other than structural ones to see if there are any other correlations,

such as with particular discourse markers, that can identify a tweet as being ironic or non-ironic

(Farias et al 2016, pg. 19:18).

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References

Faras, Delia ; Patti, Viviana ; Rosso, Paolo. (2016). Irony Detection in Twitter: The Role of

Affective Content. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT), 12 August 2016,

Vol.16(3), pp.1-24.

Kapogianni, Eleni. (2016). The ironic operation: Revisiting the components of ironic meaning.

Journal of Pragmatics, January 2016, Vol.91, pp.16-28

Page, Ruth. (2012). "Celebrity Practice: Stories Told on Twitter." In Stories and Social Media:

Identities and interaction. London: Routledge.

Weigel, David. (2016). Twitter joke about ripping up absentee ballots draws attention of

conservatives The Boston Globe. October 18 2016.