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How “the left” meme: analyzing taboo in the internet memes of r/DankLeft
Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology. (DIGSUM)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-9572-5922
Uppsala University, Sweden.
Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-6289-9427
2024 (English)In: New Media and Society, ISSN 1461-4448, E-ISSN 1461-7315Article in journal (Refereed) Epub ahead of print
Abstract [en]

This article explores how “the left” meme and the character and emotional reception of taboo-breaking therein via the case of r/DankLeft—a USA-centric Marxist, Anarchist, and Democratic Socialist Internet meme community. It asks: what themes do popular r/DankLeft Internet memes relate to, how does taboo feature within popular r/DankLeft Internet memes, and can any differences in the ways in which taboo-related r/DankLeft Internet memes are received be discerned. In turn, it carries out a thematic analysis of 366 popular memes, a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 41 taboo-related popular memes, and a comparative sentiment analysis of the comments these and other memes have received in r/DankLeft. The article finds that popular memes in r/DankLeft primarily relate to perceived threats to its community of users. It also shows that taboo-breaking does feature in r/DankLeft memes and that when it does correlative patterns emerge in terms of popularity and emotional reception.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Sage Publications, 2024.
Keywords [en]
Digital culture, discourse analysis, Internet memes, left-wing, radical left, Reddit, sentiment analysis, taboo-breaking, thematic analysis
National Category
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology) Media and Communication Studies
Research subject
Sociology; media and communication studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-221499DOI: 10.1177/14614448241232144Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85185943739OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-221499DiVA, id: diva2:1840749
Part of project
Algorithms of Resistance: Analysing and harnessing anti-racist activism in the age of datafication, Swedish Research Council
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2019-03351Available from: 2024-02-26 Created: 2024-02-26 Last updated: 2025-02-11

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Merrill, SamuelLindgren, Simon

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Citation style
  • apa
  • apa-6th-edition.csl
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf