This study explores the dynamics of persuasive communication within the context of the r/AmItheAsshole subreddit, a platform that serves as a space for individuals to share real-life conflicts, inviting impartial judgments from the Reddit community, so-called flairs. Grounded in Communication Accommodation Theory and existing research on persuasion, the study explores the impact of language attributes on persuasive outcomes, using hypothesis testing to determine significant differences between the different flairs and two broader binary categories of blame. The research aims to investigate the impact of several language attributes on persuasion and the role of language style alignment between the communicator and the recipient in shaping persuasive outcomes. Only the attribute sentiment exhibited a visual difference between the flairs, which was significant for most flairs but non-significant for the combined categories. This complexity regarding the flair categories suggests that sentiment affects persuasion but warrants further investigation in future studies. Regarding the language style similarity, a visual difference was observed only for the difference in the attribute lexical diversity, and significant results were obtained for all tested combinations. Contrary to Communication Accommodation Theory expectations, the study found that similarity in language style, specifically lexical diversity, negatively influences outcomes, raising questions for future exploration. The study provides nuanced insights into the interplay of language attributes and persuasive success in online contexts and takes an initial step toward investigating Communication Accommodation Theory in persuasion.

The aim of this thesis is to understand the way the fan community of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) perceives Marvel’s female characters. This study was focused on Marvel’s fandom on Reddit, which is a social media platform hosting millions of users. The research was conducted by using two methods – netnography and content analysis. Netnography helped for tracing Marvel fans’ behavior and engagement with other fans in an online environment, which were caused by their shared interests on discussing Marvel movies and their characters. Their comments on two key movies – ‘Black Widow’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame’ were analyzed, because these productions host female characters with major roles. Fans’ discussions on six key female figures were considered and content analysis was used for analyzing the comments of the fans. In order to understand the results, two theories were applied – affective disposition theory and feminist media (film) theory. The first one explains the way fans can form affiliations towards the movie characters, therefore it was used to understand the way they perceive the characters. The second one explains the stereotyped image of the woman in media and the way the audience perceives it. The research paradigm of interpretivism was considered for the outcome of the research, which leads to generalizations of the results. The results of this study show that there is no universal perception of the female character in Marvel, but many controversies arise. In the end, this paper discusses the limitations of this research and describes the recommendations for further research.

Social media content, as well as how it is being used and the impact it has on the society, have underwent significant transformations and nowadays they are quite different from what they were when social media just came around. Analysing the transformations is important for understanding both the current state and further development of the technology that stands behind social media. One of the most noticeable aspects of today’s social media is the phenomenon of “internet memes”. An internet meme can be roughly defined as “a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online transmission” (Davison, 2012). While memes play a substantial role in the use of social media and there has been growing interest in exploiting their potential for marketing and, more generally, conveying various types of messages, there has been a lack of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) research on memes. The understanding of how memes are perceived by social media users and how memes spread on social media is currently rather limited. The study reported in this thesis addresses the limitation of existing HCI research by presenting empirical evidence for the definition of memes, as well as memes' spreadability. Three online surveys (the total number of respondents:3161), targeting the users of the social media platforms Reddit and Facebook, were developed within the study. The social media platform Reddit was selected because it is a platform where memes are often created and also where they are moved to other platforms, like YouTube and Instagram. The study adopted a mixed method approach, combining the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data. It is shown that memes are shared because they are found funny and that they are shared within the community or with friends. But if a meme spreads and becomes popular outside this original community, the meme loses its value to the original users. Some contents, like character memes, are much easier to spread, but just as soon as they become popular, they disappear.

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As social media has emerged to become a key site for contemporary communications and cultural production, the internet meme has penetrated every level of social networking online. Albeit being a global phenomenon with pervasive discursive power in a number of fields ranging from humour to international politics and cyber warfare, comparatively little research has been made into how internet memes work on the discursive level of identity formation and their influence on the formation of internet-based social movements. Using Reddit stock market anarchists r/WallStreetBets as case study, this thesis will use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze how internet memes work on the level of socio-political formations and how their function can be understood in relation to entropic social environments online. This thesis investigates how internet memes are used as a tool for creation of motifs for action, identity markers, connective action, and social narrativization within an ambivalent social movement online. Introducing the novel term ”memetic discourse” as a way to understand memes as transferable units of memetically programmed content, this study shows the potential of memes to act as effective yet unstable modes of communication within networked environments.

This diploma thesis deals with the phenomenon of Internet memes. The theory of memes came from the evolutionary biologist R. Dawkins in the late 1970s, as a cultural analogy of genes. Decades later, the term "meme" began to appear in Internet culture in conjuction with Internet jokes. This thesis works with the concepts of meme, virality, spreadable media and media convegence. All of these terms define the current Internet environment. The diploma thesis is based mainly on books by L. Shifman: Memes in Digital Culture, H. Jenkins: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (co-authored) and K. Nahon and J. Hemsley: Going Viral. This diploma thesis deals with the definition of the term meme and its differentiation from the term virality, because for the average Internet user, these two terms are synonymous. The thesis describes meme genres, phases of the creation of Internet memes, which arise mainly from spreadble media and on the basis of which principles are memes created and what factors contribute to their spread in cyberspace. The analytical part consists of a contextual analysis of selected Internet memes, which demonstrates how digital manipulation changes the context of memes in which the meme can be used and how this...

Historically author profiling has been used in forensic linguistics. However, it is not until the last decades that the analysis method has worked into computer science and machine learning. In comparison, determining author profiling characteristics in machine learning is nothing new. This paper investigates the possibility to improve upon previous results with modern frameworks using data sets that have seen limited usage. The purpose of this master thesis was to use pre-trained transformers or embeddings together with transfer learning. In addition, to examine if general author profiling characteristics of anonymous users on internet forums or conversations on social media could be determined. The data sets used to investigate the questions above were PAN15 and PANDORA, which contains various properties in text data based on authors paired with ground truth labels such as gender, age, and Big Five/OCEAN. In addition, transfer learning of BERT and GloVe was used as a starting point to decrease the learning time of a new task. PAN15, a Twitter data set, did not contain enough data when training a model and was augmented using PANDORA, a Reddit-based data set. Ultimately, BERT obtained the best performance using a stacked approach, achieving 86 − 91% accuracy for each label on unseen data.

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Background: There has been a noticeable growth in the use of sponsorships and corporate social responsibility in the world of professional sports, especially in football. This phenomenon is not particularly surprising given that modern companies are forced to compete for the attention of more socially conscious audiences. The socially responsible reputation of a firm may be significantly strengthened by incorporating CSR and CRM efforts. Audiences have shown to have a more positive opinion of these initiatives when they are implemented in the sports industry, often differentiating them from direct corporate marketing due to their perceived authenticity and compassion. Hummel's decision to tone down the Danish national team's kit for The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar serves as a compelling example of cause-related marketing within the football industry.   Purpose: The development of an in-depth understanding of how online communities perceive the cause-related campaign executed by Hummel at The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Method: Qualitative Research; Interpretivism; Methodology – Exploratory Case Study; Inductive Approach; Data Collection – Systematic; Sampling – Deliberate/Nonprobability Sampling; Data Analysis – Content Analysis (creation of tree-diagrams based on quotes, generic categories and main categories)  Conclusion: The authors have undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the findings derived from content analysis, establishing meaningful connections between these findings and relevant theories regarding cause-related marketing (CRM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). As a result, this study makes a contribution to the scholarly understanding of the potential responses exhibited by online communities towards cause-related marketing campaigns. The findings of this study shed light on the diverse range of reactions that can be anticipated when a company chooses to engage in such sponsorship endeavors.

Les échanges au sujet de phénomènes paranormaux sont présents et bien installés sur le web. Le choix de plateformes qui s’offre aux utilisateurs est vaste pour partager son expérience avec les autres. Certains choisissent Reddit et particulièrement des subreddits dédiés au paranormal. Ce mémoire analyse une communauté en ligne, active sur le subreddit r/Ghosts, constituée de fans des phénomènes paranormaux. Je m’interroge sur les moyens mis en œuvre par cette communauté pour interagir dans le but de faire sens de la question de la potentielle existence des fantômes. À l’aide de concepts comme l’interactionnisme symbolique, la culture participative et l’intelligence collective, j’ai analysé une quarantaine d’interactions textuelles issues d’un partage de contenu médiatique. Les membres de la communauté, appelés redditors, interagissent pour trouver des solutions à des énigmes perçues comme étant de nature paranormale, mais aussi pour discuter et se divertir. Ces redditors interagissent avec différentes valeurs et croyances, parfois partagées. / The web is awash with conversations about paranormal activity. There are a lot of platforms on which users can share their experience. Some choose to pick Reddit and particularly subreddits dedicated to the paranormal. This master’s thesis studies the subreddit r/Ghosts, an online community (OC) dedicated to ghosts. Here, I question the means used by this OC to make sense of the possible existence of ghosts via interaction. Using theories and concepts such as symbolic interactionism, participatory culture, and collective intelligence, I studied over forty textual interactions initiated by a post including a media (picture, video, or audio). The redditors of r/Ghosts interact with each other to figure out paranormal enigmas but also to simply discuss or for entertainment purposes. They interact with different values and beliefs that they sometimes share.