“Tears have never won anyone freedom:” a multimodal discourse analysis of Ukraine’s use of memes in a propaganda war of global scale

Abstract

This paper analyzes memes posted by @Ukraine to X, formerly known as Twitter, from the account’s inception in 2016 through September 2023 to examine the function and utility of memes as tools of propaganda in global conflict.

Keywords

• propaganda
• multimodal discourse analysis
• memes
• twitter
• polysemy