Lecture at Czech Technical University, April 9, 2025

Humor, Social Media, and Fighting Online Disinformation with Memes in Pandemic-Era Taiwan

In the lecture, I pursue several questions, including: Is humor culturally specific? Do memes have to be about humor? And if humor expresses in different, culturally mediated ways, can memes look different around the world, too? I address these questions by looking at government-sponsored memes in Taiwan during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as how these memes resonated in society at large, how they were remixed and redistributed. Can social media — decried as creating echo chambers that threaten to undermine democracy — actually become tools in the fight against online disinformation?