#HaStatoPutin Affinity Space: From Political Work to Autotelic Humor

Abstract

This article reports the findings of a diachronic sociopragmatic study on the politically loaded Italian hashtag #HaStatoPutin based on an automatically generated corpus of tweets (N = 31,334), encompassing two datasets from before and after what Putin originally called Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine that commenced on 24 February 2022. #HaStatoPutin appeared on Twitter in 2015 to mark tweets criticizing what Italian users considered to be unsupported conspiracy theories targeting Vladimir Putin, viewed by these users as a scapegoat in mainstream political rhetoric spread in the Western world. As this comparative study shows, the emergent applications of the hashtag are hardly affected by the events of 2022, indicating the stability of the expression and the political opinions of polarized Italian society, regardless of the socio-political context. Specifically, four tweet categories, which express tweeters’ political opinions or serve humorous purposes, are identified in both datasets: dissociative echo, counter-criticism, mock conspiracy theories, and metacomments. Given the specificity of #HaStatoPutin, its political contextualization, and applications, with which the users need to be familiar to create and understand tagged tweets, it is proposed that the tweeting practice makes for a “hashtag affinity space” on Twitter.