Does Humour Belong in Politics (on Twitter)?

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Kristen Guth and Alex Leavitt, who begin by highlighting Twitter's 2015 attempts to reduce the plagiarism of jokes by retweeting. Their real focus is on humour during the 2012 presidential debates in the US, though, and they focus on the three presidential debates during the campaign.

The team used live coding and dynamic keyword management during the debate, to capture as much as possible of the Twitter discussion around the debates. This resulted in 427 linguistic rules capturing some 33m tweets from 5.4m users, of which some 51% were retweets.

Audiences and journalists both benefit from exchanges in network environments, and Twitter enables both elites and non-elites to engage in political debate. Humour plays an important part in all this, and humorous tweets receive greater longevity and visibility than breaking news.

Some of these tweets also make the headlines; they are picked by the media as representative of the tweeted jokes, but really only represent the tip of the iceberg. The project therefore explored the breadth of humour in more detail by coding a greater number of tweets to explore how many of them were humorous.

Of the 1346 tweets coded, some 22% of tweets were humorous (and that's a conservative assessment); extrapolated and with retweets, this means that some one third of the entire corpus would have been humorous. Key themes for the humour were the candidates themselves, the debate arguments, and references to pop culture.

Humorous tweets tended to get more retweets, but the project explored the impacts of a number of other factors as well (such as the presence of URLs, hashtags, and embedded media). Even controlling for all of these other variables, humorous tweets were much more likely to get retweets; the presence of hashtags or media also increased the likelihood of retweets, however.

This may turn out to be an important factor in how news sources report the social media discussion in the next round of presidential debates; but this also depends on whether pivotal moments will include humour.