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Verification Gestures by Twitter Users: Media Materials and Vernacular Investigations

Pratiques de vérification des utilisateurs de Twitter : contenus médiatiques et enquêtes vernaculaires
Angèle Stalder and Gustavo Gomez-Mejia

Abstracts

This article summarises a four-year research experiment (2018-2022) conducted as part of the ANR VIJIE project, exploring information verification practices. It focuses on the vernacular practices of Twitter users engaged in independent investigations and critical actions on the platform. Taking inspiration from digital ethnography, the authors provide insights into their methodology, which involved collecting diverse media materials related to “fake news” and fact-checking, emphasising the significance of private messages (DMs) in this project’s aims. The article outlines three key dimensions for analysing these vernacular investigations—figures, events, and gestures—that reflect on the evolving landscape of information verification and fact-checking practices using socio-semiotic and documentary perspectives. This study and its thematic collections of screenshots and publications contribute to a deeper cultural understanding of verification gestures within digital spaces.

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Introduction

1To what extent can verification practices be thought of as a set of particular questions and gestures regarding information? And what does it imply for a researcher to observe such digital phenomena on a daily basis? With those preliminary questions in mind, in this article, we would like to take a look back at a four-handed research experiment conducted on the social media platform, which at the time was called Twitter, now X, over four years (2018-2022) as part of the ANR VIJIE project (Verification of Information in Journalism, on the Internet, and in Public Space).

2Within the frame of this collective research project, led by Jérémie Nicey and devoted to the verification and fact-checking practices—often thought about from a professional, institutional, or journalistic perspective—we wanted to closely study the vernacular practices of Internet users who conduct their own investigations and perform a broad range of critical gestures on Twitter. How might we think about these vernacular investigations that take place in the ordinary dynamics of networks? Faced with the amount of media material circulating on social platforms, to what extent can we observe the emergence of verification gestures that epitomise new approaches being developed by Internet users?

3In order to reflect upon this experiment, which progressively changed our views on the verification of information, this article retraces our three-stage intellectual journey: firstly, we explain the genesis and arrangement of our collection of media materials from Twitter; secondly, we propose three dimensions that structured our analysis of vernacular investigations in terms of figures, events, and gestures; thirdly, we reflect upon how socio-semiotic and documentary logics emerge through these digital practices.

Digital “Ragpickers”? A Reflexive Account on Collecting Media Materials on Twitter

4In order to explain where this project began, we need to go back over the thread of this research and engage in a methodological flashback to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at an intellectual experiment that situates us in the long-term both as researchers and individual Internet users. In 2018, when the ANR VIJIE project began, supported in particular by researchers at the Prim research unit and the École Publique de Journalisme in Tours, we were not working on journalism. Our respective backgrounds and research sensibilities were—and still are—more concerned with the fields of documentation or semiotics, which means that our main interest for digital media is driven by the analysis of their socially significant uses and concrete cultural expressions. To contribute from this particular point of view to the VIJIE research project, we thus undertook an exploratory process of observation and collection of media materials related to information verification and fact-checking practices on Twitter.

5In a very concrete way, by the end of 2018, we began observing diverse content that was being circulated via Twitter—between the trends and controversies of the day—explicitly related to the topics of “fake news,” or fact-checking. With an exploratory focus on collecting such content, we started using “private messages”—DMs—in order to gather traces of salient media materials (texts, images, videos) and document our own comments whenever a publication caught our eye in the course of spontaneous Twitter consultations.

6To illustrate the genesis of our approach, quite literally by going up the thread of our DMs, at the very beginning of our experiment, we originally found a few tweets that emerged in the ambient commotion of the Gilets Jaunes crisis back in December 2018 (Fig. 1). One was about the dubious source of a document circulating with the #GiletsJaunes hashtag (the “Geneva Council for Rights & Liberties,” a fake site with the appearance of being an institution); the other a rumour about the presidential plane being ready to take off to evacuate Emmanuel Macron in the event of widespread insurrection. And in the context of such domestic French political news, a tweet appeared: “Le niveau de gobage de fakenews est assez stratosphérique 😂” (a French colloquial expression commenting how “the level of swallowing fakenews is pretty stratospheric 😂”).

Figure 1. Exchanges via Direct Message: Charting Genesis of a Thematic Collection on Twitter (Screenshot, 10/12/2018)

7From a narratological point of view, at the origin of a narrative, there is often a “misdeed” (Marion, 1997). In our case, these first intuitive and heterogeneous findings on Twitter were quickly followed by a concrete methodological proposal, also made on December 10, 2018. In our own Internet language style, punctuated by pseudonyms and emoticons, this private conversation marked the beginning of our initial project to collect media materials by repurposing the use of “direct messaging” on the platform:

  • 1 « Chère BeAnDaFo, en attendant de définir une meilleure stratégie de collecte, peut-être pouvons-no (...)

Dear BeAnDaFo, until we define a better collection strategy, perhaps we can document here so many ordinary and tasty fake news and denials ? (Dec 10, 2018 at 12 :04 PM)1

Yes let's document here the fake news and public denials spotted on twitter, but we'll have to think about a back-up and back-up format for the collected data :-)

  • 2 « Oui documentons ici les fake et démentis repérés sur twitter, mais il faudra penser sauvegarde et (...)

Modern logorrhea, digital incontinences going down the scroll, over-inscribed on our desk which modestly hides behind in the dark (Dec 10, 2018 at 1 :06 PM)2

8In hindsight, it is interesting to observe that the topic of “fake news” and its verification elicits both ordinary and detective-like imaginings of our own position as researchers and observers of a phenomenon on Twitter. Over time, we gradually developed a research approach that uses DMs to collect fake news and denials (e.g. public refutations, fact-checks, démentis) on a daily basis. There is no doubt that we undertook this approach from the perspective that we would be monitoring information within a given thematic field: we embraced the idea of “surveilling” this media environment, but without applying the rationale of a professional intelligence officer. Doing the digital fieldwork of gathering Twitter posts, we projected ourselves as the allegorical figure of the Benjaminian ragpicker, “A ragpicker at daybreak, lancing with his stick scraps of language and tatters of speech in order to throw them into his cart” (see Benjamin, 1998 [1930]; Gomez-Mejia, 2023). According to this allegorical way of thinking, the “scraps of language” and the “tatters of speech” are the contents of tweets and the cart, the DM thread. This figure of the ragpicker—which Walter Benjamin borrowed from Baudelaire’s chiffonnier—acquires an extremely contemporary resonance in relation to the abundance of production and the excesses of digital industries:

  • 3 « Voici un homme chargé de ramasser les débris d’une journée de la capitale. Tout ce que la grande (...)

Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry (Baudelaire, 1961 [1851]).3

9In the industrial context of the Twitter platform, the ragpicker’s manual work of gathering and sorting materials fostered the development of a close relationship with the materials collected. It was a question of taking a look at ephemeral content that could at times be considered worthless, but which nonetheless shed new light on the problem we wished to study. This approach gave rise to more ritualised research gestures: collection, annotation, occasional screenshots, and attempts at indexing and categorization. In the exploratory phase, our digital ragpicking efforts led us to select and store material with the intention of building corpora of Twitter content. This “digital hoarding” (Hogan, 2015) of contents related to the issues of fake news and fact-checking was followed by attempts to organise and classify them by main and subordinate themes. As we watched and built a “born-digital” archive (Musiani et al., 2019) of tweets and screenshots for our corpora, we experienced what Barthes once called “saturation”: we ended up “coming across facts and relationships that had already been identified” (Barthes, 1977:97). This observation of “saturations” helped us to identify several thematic recurrences over time (related to criticisms, visualities, figures, events and verification gestures) whose emblematic materialities inspired the sections of this article. As the research progressed, our initial intent to have a stabilised set of corpora gradually gave way to the emergence of a reflexive questioning of its relevance as an approach to analysing living digital materials. Digital materials tend to transcend fixed categories and emerge through situated encounters, which often involve algorithmic serendipities and ephemeral conjunctures. An increasing awareness of the contemporary tensions that affect methods stemming from a semiological sensibility—as they have to deal with transmutations induced by the cultural materialism of platforms—led us to embrace an auto-ethnographic turn in the spirit of a “digital collectionism” (Le Marec & Mairesse, 2017).

10As such, we would like to posit that the aforementioned collection practices are akin to “digital ethnography” or “autoethnography,” particularly in their tendency to situate us as researchers in an illusory posture of “eager participant-lurker” and “expert fabricator” (de Seta, 2020). Our “digital ragpicking” efforts echo autoethnographic approaches that are currently being explored in various digital fields and have led to the creation of diverse, creative methodological “bricolages” in France (Jahjah, 2022; Julliard & Saemmer, 2022; Burlat et al. 2024; Faury, 2024). In the international context, our methodological perspectives can be brought into dialogue with French-speaking Canadian works devoted to qualitative approaches in a digital context (Millette et al., 2020) and with case studies focusing on the everyday workings of “fake news” (Frank, 2015; Duque et al., 2022).

11This digital ragpicking via DM on Twitter has enabled us to gradually de-center our gaze. As a result, we found ourselves collecting a variety of media materials that were thematised as we went along. Faced with a catch-all term like “fake news” or generic categories like “fact-checking”, we began to notice a number of smaller or more specific issues which were related to very concrete digital practices.

How Can We De-Center the Way We Look at Fact-Checking Practices?

  • 4 « Coucou @BFMTV la vérité vient de ce monsieur en gilet jaune derrière votre journaliste ».
  • 5 « LES MERDIAS SONT DES LECHES Q à MACRON les FAKES NEW SE COMPTE PAR MILLIERS » (sic).

12When we came into contact with the material collected on Twitter, we always asked ourselves this question: how should we look at the material’s forms, circulation, and content? Very quickly, we were able to document content that reflected a certain media or institutional approach to fact-checking topics, one focused on asserting a “verification imperative” (Nicey, 2022). We are referring, of course, to many well-known and studied arguments that seek to legitimate information verification and fact-checking practices either by denouncing distrust of the media (or “merdias” [a French portmanteau for shit+media] – Mercier & Amigo, 2021), by pointing to “fake news” as a complex political threat (Badouard, 2017, 2020), or by emphasising the urgent need to strengthen media literacy (Corroy & Froissart, 2018). This type of content collected on Twitter—which you see below (Fig. 2)—could all well fit in with these now conventional arguments when it comes to illustrating a certain “societal panic” or “moral panic” (Garland, 2008) towards information users (citizens, internet users, media consumers) overtly criticising French mainstream news media outlets: “Hey @BFMTV the truth comes from this gentleman in a yellow vest behind your reporter”;4 “THE MEDIA ARE BROWN-NOSING MACRON THE FAKE NEWS ARE COUNTED IN THOUSANDS.”5

Figure 2. Criticisms of media outlets by Twitter users (2018-2022).

Putting Materials in Tension: Three Questions on the Verification of Information

13In addition to our “nethnographic” approach (Jouët & Le Caroff, 2013), another possibility for studying the social circulation of a “verification imperative” would have been to interrogate materials that explicitly bring a conventional regime of information verification into existence: how does “fact-checking” materially exist on Twitter? In this vein, we were able to assemble a collection of posts that had been “stamped” signs with the words “Fake,” “FAKE NEWS!,” “False,” “Faux,” “INTOX,” and even “Bulo” from Spanish (Fig. 3): from a semiotic point of view, this series of “red stamps” constitutes a stereotypical form which seems consubstantial to the media materiality of fact-checking practices.

Figure 3. The material existence of “fact-checking” in the form of “red stamps” (2019)

14But this type of “trivial” circulating material (Jeanneret, 2008) that brings the “verification imperative” into existence on screen also appears to us to be struck by a series of subsequent tensions that we can synthesise into three crucial points: Who verifies? What do we verify? How do we verify?

Who verifies?

15When it comes to fact-checking practices on Twitter, an initial tension arises in relation to the types of enunciators involved: is it always the media institution that plays the role of verifier or fact-checker? Or can ordinary Twitter users also be involved in this verification process? The practice of producing verification discourses raises a fundamental tension between institutional and vernacular discourses.

16Rather than looking at verification from the point of view of the authoritative media enunciator, our analyses take a vernacular approach. In line with other research carried out on the Internet, the “vernacular” category allows us to observe non-institutional (R. G Howard, 2008) or “profane” (Calabrese, 2014) discourses and to qualify ordinary practices that resemble informal and fragmentary investigations without the normative weight of the journalistic profession (Bigot, 2017) or the innovative ambitions of emergent OSINT practices (Deneuville et al., 2022). The “vernacular” category also allows us to highlight the creative voices of cultural experiences and popular sensibilities specific to Twitter (Burgess, 2006; Burgess & Baym, 2020).

What do we verify?

17In terms of fact-checking, a tension arises over what is being verified: is it a question of fact-checking a media production or an ideological spectrum? In other words, this tension concerns the relationship between contents and beliefs.

18Epistemologically speaking, when an actor verifies or fact-checks, is he or she seeking to “invalidate a particular content”—or questioning a belief? This question becomes even more complex if we think of it in the light of what Michel de Certeau wrote about “belief”: “I take ‘belief’ to mean not what is believed (a dogma, a programme, etc.), but the investiture of subjects in a proposition, the act of uttering it while holding it to be true—in other words, a ‘modality’ of the affirmation rather than its content” (de Certeau, 1990 (1980): 260). In this tension between content and belief, the challenge lies in understanding public enunciation practices that persist in holding a proposition to be true despite its supposed invalidation. Confronted with those fact-checking stamps that claim to invalidate a piece of content (like a post stamped “FALSE”), the question of persistent beliefs involves considering the dynamics of a social relationship to the ways of affirming something on Twitter, where beliefs are expressed in the midst of communities of values and “agitated clusters” (Chun, 2021).

How does one verify?

19How does one actually proceed when it comes to verifying content on Twitter? In other words, what is the relationship with the materiality of what is “false” or verified? How granular is what is being verified on screen? The verified content we observe on Twitter raises this third tension between totality and detail. There is a scale for observing content editing/intervention, and this scale is concerned with approaches that are more or less concerned with going into detail. We are referring to Daniel Arasse when he describes “dettaglio” (detail) as attention paid “to the process of reception engaged in by the subject” (Arasse, 1996). It is not a question of thinking what is more or less false or partially true, but of seeing concretely in the pixels on the screens the details of a series of material interventions carried out to verify a piece of content. Thus, we are trying to get a close-up view of the materials and the subjects who circulate them.

20These three tensions between the institutional and the vernacular, between content and belief, and between totality and detail gradually led us to suspend conventional representations of the problem of verification in order to analyse the fragmentary and sometimes anecdotal materiality of ordinary investigations carried out on Twitter.

Figures, Events, Gestures: Entry Points for Studying Vernacular Investigations on Twitter

21How can we analyse vernacular investigations on Twitter? What materialities characterise them? To illustrate vernacular investigations on Twitter—attempts by users to verify content as closely as possible—we propose to examine a material screen culture through three problematised entry points based on the collections of fragments we have assembled: we focus on well-known influential figures, events, and gestures that can be observed in detail across scenes of ordinary life on the network.

Figures: From the Production of an Influential Debunker to the Commitment of a Vigilant Community

  • 6 “@DeBunKerEtoiles / Destroyer of conspiracy theories - Fact-checker agency Fact and Furious.”

22Vernacular investigations on Twitter can revolve around well-known figures specialising in the field of verification. We have chosen to document this perspective with the example of Debunker des Etoiles (48.7k followers in March 2022), whose followers produce a lot of content and tweet it to this influential account. The very name of the account, an allusion to debunking, and its profile “bio” set out the promise of thematic specialisation: “@DeBunKerEtoiles / Détricoteur de théories du complot – Fact-checker agence Fact and Furious.6 This French Youtuber appeals to us as an instrumental figure because he mediates between the interests of certain conventional institutional discourses on disinformation and the vernacular dynamics of verification on Twitter. Moreover, in December 2021, an article was devoted to Debunker des Etoiles (Sylvain Cavalier) in Google’s magazine AZERTY, created by TBWA and distributed free of charge by the national press—at the very time when Google was running corporate campaigns on its commitment to the fight against disinformation. As a ‘poster boy’ in Google's corporate communications and an ‘opinion leader’ on the Twitter network, his approach to fact-checking and debunking has concrete echoes in user practices.

Figure 4. Figurations of Debunker des Etoiles in his Twitter profile and an article on him in Azerty (n° 5, 11/12/2021)

23On Twitter and elsewhere, such influential figures produce digital content specific to the investigations they are conducting. This creative and media dynamic is illustrated in a tweet posted January 7, 2022, during the pandemic. @DeBunKerEtoiles tweeted a table created that documented and synthesised a wide range of disinformation about the Covid-19 health crisis (Fig. 5). The “graphic reason” (Goody, 1979) of a tabular format makes it possible to create a census of debunked conspiracist statements, which not only plays on their thematic seriality and predictability, but also satirises their persistence over two calendar years. Under the heading “AVANT/APRES” (“BEFORE/AFTER”), a series of radical propositions (“The Pasteur Institute invented and patented the coronavirus in 2004,” “The coronavirus is derived from HIV,” “Clay and vitamin C cure the coronavirus,” “The vaccine causes genocide,” “There are nano-chips in PCR tests”) are thus inventoried in the grid-like form of a spreadsheet with two complementary columns entitled “2020: Faux” (2020: False) and “2021: Toujours Faux” (2021: Still False).

Figure 5. An inventory of debunked conspiracies: Screenshot of a table by Debunker des Etoiles (7/1/2022)

  • 7 « Les fake news d’hier sont les vérités d’aujourd’hui, pas ma faute ».

24This screenshot of the table is accompanied by a comment by @DeBunKerEtoiles who plays with the ambivalence of the word “systematic.” It seeks to provoke a target cluster: “the conspiracy theorists” whose assertions claim to be “systematically correct” when in fact they turn out to be “systematically” wrong. Retweeted 165 times by the debunker's community of followers, this updated inventory thus constitutes a codified mockery based on the shared experience of the community and reveals the possibility of putting together an “anthology” (Doueihi, 2008) of the cultural productions of disinformation. This same table by Debunker des Etoiles is used as part of a vernacular investigation conducted by user Clémentdicapé, one of the followers of his vigilant community. We observe that the initial table from 7 January 2022 was “redocumentarised” (Pédauque, 2007) on 15 February 2022, when Clémentdicapé republished it in response to an account identified as belonging to a conspiracy theorist, who had tweeted: “yesterday’s fake news are today’s truths, not my fault.”7

Figure 6. The redocumentarisation of a debunker’s content by a vigilant investigator (15/2/22)

  • 8 « Je n’avais pas remarqué mais c’est encore un 👇"Hello my name is firstname bunchofnumbers and I ha (...)

25This provocative tweet from the @julienc80632153 account gave Clémentdicapé the opportunity to republish a screenshot of the Debunker des Étoiles table, playing on its temporal dimension. To the conspiracy theorist’s proposal that “yesterday’s fake news” become “today's truths,” Clémentdicapé ironically replied “yeah yeah...” (“ouais ouais”) and confronted it with the “BEFORE/AFTER 2020/2021” table (Fig. 6). Beyond being an act of vigilant engagement, this redocumentarisation of the table also provides an opportunity to perform a relationship between the influential figure of reference and his Twitter follower: the @DeBunKerEtoiles account is tagged (“Merde… il a pas aimé le tableau” / “Shit... he didn’t like the table”), to which the latter reacts straight afterwards in the thread (“Faut que j’actualise à 2022” /”I need to update to 2022”). Continuing his vernacular investigation, Clémentdicapé also documents the correspondence of the 'conspiracist' account to a codified and discrediting stereotype: the use of a first name followed by a number as the account name on Twitter. This detail is taken as a clue disqualifying @julienc80632153’s statements by the investigator. “I hadn't noticed but it's another 👇"Hello my name is firstname bunchofnumbers and I have incredibly shitty opinions,”8 one can read in a supplementary screenshot that Clémentdicapé reposted as a joke belonging to Twitter folklore, in the same way as the practice of blocking opponents (as is also the case here). The relationship between the figure and the follower is therefore one of rituals, complicity ties and shared references, giving the impression that they are fighting a common informational battle under the guidance of an authority figure. In line with the writings of Verón (1982, 1988) on the circulation of social discourse, these enunciative repetitions of references within a community give authority to the figure’s discourse.

Events: From Ongoing News Stories to Real-Time Quests for Credible References

  • 9 « INFO DIRECT Greta thunberg se serait apparement noyée lors de son voyage en bateau pour rejoindre (...)

26Vernacular investigations on Twitter can be deployed around events that are being verified. In our experience, a recurring theme emerged around the verification of death announcements. We will use an example that enabled us to identify the characteristic elements of vernacular investigation when it takes place in the context of suspicious or highly uncertain news. Among the archetypal events of the “fake news” or “hoax” genre (Nansen et al., 2019), fake deaths can paradoxically enliven the atmosphere of a network like Twitter, a digital space which, as we have seen, also hosts vernacular verification efforts by vigilant users. In the course of our research, we were able to observe and document a real-time verification process into the fake death of Greta Thunberg. On 28 August 2019, an account called “el billy motivado” (@rebeumotive) published this tweet “BREAKING NEWS Greta thunberg apparently drowned during her boat trip to New York to attend the G7 #ripgretathunberg.9 It is interesting to see a rising public figure become the victim of a fake death. A fake death that takes place in the context of a “media agenda” (McCombs & Shaw, 1972)—where the heavily covered young environmental activist’s crossing of the Atlantic in a sailboat provides the narrative opportunity for the fake. Following viral logics, a #RIPGretaThunberg hashtag becomes a “trending” topic on Twitter, arousing emotional reactions and ultimately triggering an investigation that mobilises network users.

  • 10 « Le 28 Août 2019, Greta Thonberg (sic) est retrouvée morte, noyée, sur son trajet vers le G7 2019, (...)
  • 11 « Une vrai bande de fatigué (sic) #RipGretaThunberg #GretaThunberg ».
  • 12 « Wikipedia ils deviennent fous à cause de votre #RipGretaThunberg ».
  • 13 « Greta Thunberg (...). This article is regularly the target of unwanted modifications and is not f (...)

27In this vernacular investigation, the collective debunking efforts involve exposing a series of screenshots from Wikipedia. From the outset, the aim is to show that the article devoted to Greta Thunberg has been modified. For instance, recent suspicious additions to the article are highlighted in red on a screenshot: “On 28 August 2019, Greta Thonberg (sic) is found dead, drowned, on her way to the 2019 G7, in Biarritz, France RT if sad.”10 Twitter user @NoKsosForLife comments the Wikipedia screenshot at 11:40 pm: “What a bunch of tired people #RipGretaThunberg #GretaThunberg.”11 The next day, 29 August 2019, at 4:19 am, another Twitter user named Une Noire (@Mwana40011883) alerts: “Wikipedia is going crazy because of your #RipGretaThunberg.”12 By way of proof, she posts a screenshot of Greta Thunberg’s Wikipedia page with a finger pointing to the words: “Greta Thunberg (...). Cet article est la cible régulière de modifications indésirables et n'est pas librement modifiable.”13

  • 14 « #RipGretaThunberg Wikipédia en sueur ».

28Other screenshots from this vernacular investigation even document the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia where Wikipedians check the “revision history” of the Greta Thunberg page. On 29 August at 1:19 am, Percy Andersson (@andersson_percy) posted a tweet that read “#RipGretaThunberg Wikipedia currently sweating”14 and published a screenshot of the editorial control log for the French article. Through these vernacular investigations of a newsworthy event in the form of a series of screenshots, the quests for credible references are multiplied and gain momentum. In the case of the fake death of Greta Thunberg, Wikipedia appears to be a source of information, a target for parody and an arena for editorial conflict. This is the complexity of Wikipedia when it comes to establishing a socially valid text that is regulated by an online community (Doutreix, 2020). Hence the importance of such screenshots making collective editorial work visible again within the polyphonic frameworks that characterise Wikipedia’s digital writing (Souchier et al., 2019). In the aftermath, once the community work is done, fact-checking accounts and media outlets such as BFMTV end up posting derivative and retrospective content retracing and debunking the viral hoax.

  • 15 « Ceux qui disent qu’il ne faut pas relayer le #RIPGretaThunberg mais qui le citent quand même et l (...)

29In addition, the vernacular investigation allows users to gain reflexivity by highlighting a Twitter paradox that relates to its algorithm: attempts to combat the #RipGretaThunberg hashtag paradoxically increased its circulation and ultimate reach. As early as 28 August 2019, a vigilant Internet user named Anchorwave was already warning: “Those who say you shouldn’t relay the #RIPGretaThunberg hashtag but quote-tweet it anyway, make it trend higher. Well done, geniuses!”15 In a research-creation exercise for the Bobcatsss conference, “Information Management, Fake News and Disinformation” (2020), we documented this complex and exemplary event in the form of a funeral poster (Fig. 7), in order to trace the circulation of this unexpected “fake death” and the unfolding of its collaborative and polyphonic debunking as it played out on Twitter.

Figure 7. Fake Death Announcements on Twitter: a research poster on the case of Greta Thunberg (Stalder & Gomez-Mejia, Bobcatsss, 2020)

Gestures: The Vernacular Investigation between Circled Screenshots, Ironic Sourcing, and Offline-to-Online Sharing

30A third point of entry into these vernacular investigations invites us to consider a perspective that is not centred on influential figures or events but focuses more on a set of gestures that are becoming recurrent within vernacular investigations on Twitter. In other words, vernacular investigation is characterised by the use of semiotic and documentary gestures that tend to become ritualised. Hereafter, we will focus on three gestures—among others—that we have been able to document fragmentarily in the form of an iconographic “atlas” (Warburg, 2012) in order to explore the visual cultures of the worlds of verification and disinformation.

31A first recurring gesture in vernacular investigations on Twitter involves the use of circled screenshots (Fig. 8), the publication of screen captures annotated by users: a gesture whose “production grammar” (Verón, 1987) corresponds technically to the execution of the pair “taking a screenshot” + “singling out a suspicious detail with a coloured circle.” Like an optical zoom, this gesture of documentation and annotation is used to direct Internet users’ gaze towards visual details identified as potential clues: it may be a question of injecting doubt in the face of an incongruous or suspicious element, or of highlighting supposed evidence, usually circled in red with the expressiveness of a handwritten intervention (Fig. 8). This graphic gesture reframes the vernacular investigation by enabling the concrete verification of a detail or by establishing a piece of evidence in a probative regime: for example, the date of a post, the disappearance of a word on a sign, a blurry presence.

Figure 8. Mosaic of verification gestures on Twitter using circled screenshots (2018-2019)

  • 16 « Source ? mec crois moi ».
  • 17 « The international journal of t’inquiète crois moi (sic) ».

32A second recurring gesture with regard to suspicious information on Twitter is the promotion of ironic sourcing (Fig. 9), formalised by associating a request for a source with an expression of visual irony. In practical terms, this involves casting doubt on a piece of content by going beyond the traditional “source?” question. To do this, users mobilise images with sarcastic connotations that discredit dubious content that has been published. We can thus document the emergence of a vernacular iconographic repertoire specifically designed to satirise this type of suspect content. This visual folklore is a testament to the creativity of Internet users and ironic sourcing ultimately enriches the palette of the “reaction” meme-genre (Shifman, 2014). The use of these ironic visual materials articulates, within the vernacular investigation, the joint logics of disqualification and derision. Following a gradation of suspicions, we move from the “source?” to the denunciation “Source? believe me man,”16 to the pseudo-scientific reference source “the international journal of don’t worry believe me”17 and finally to fictional disqualifications: “directed by Quentin Inventino”, “Inventflix” or “Invented Things.”

33From an imaginary point of view, the vernacular content mobilised by these ironic sourcing gestures stands out as a testimony of Internet users’ attachment to humorous subversions and source quoting cultures, while at the same time materially bringing together the regimes of reality and fiction.

Figure 9. Mosaic of ironic sourcing verification gestures on Twitter (Dates 2019-2022)

34A third recurring gesture in Twitter investigations is “offline to online” sharing (Fig. 10), a gesture that takes place when users take a photo of a suspect document offline and publish it on social networks. On Twitter, this sharing can also involve mentioning or tagging figures or contacts involved in the process of verifying the information. This is a testimonial register that documents a certain phenomenology of false information, with a circumstantial “effect of reality” (Barthes, 1968): documents received in mailboxes, read in doctors’ waiting rooms, or posted in public spaces. This gesture can also be tinged with satirical intent. However, it reveals other vernacular textures of these ordinary investigations: beyond screenshots, the aim is to denounce a certain “panoply” (Labelle, 2007) of disinformation, as it is still mediated by printed, posted, pinned, or taped paper objects that can be documented collaboratively or denounced socially as vehicles of false information.

Figure 10. Mosaic of verification gestures on Twitter via offline-to-online sharing (2021)

Conclusion

35At this concluding stage of our article, we can perhaps reconsider some of the claims and injunctions that are usually linked to contemporary practices of verifying information online. Must they always result in the rectification, deletion or eradication of falsehoods? These are problematic expectations for researchers who adopt a digital ethnographic approach on the Internet. From our work collecting data on pre-Elon Musk Twitter (2018-2022), as we went into the details of the vernacular investigations that take place on the social media platform, we got to see the full richness of a culture structured around what is deemed “fake”: its figures, its relationships, its rituals, its events, its expressions, its visual folklore... From the characteristics of the vernacular investigations and gestures that we have been able to document and analyse, are we not dealing with a material culture that drives, to a certain extent, the daily social life of the platforms?

36This reflexive questioning may lead us to open the discussion in two directions. Firstly, from a methodological point of view: should we preserve this material culture around false information and the gestures it generates, or even consider it as part of our living heritage? This argument also raises the question of how to make a collection on this emerging topic: is it enough to take screenshots or to extract data given the complexity of contextual knowledge? On the other hand, from a speculative perspective, an additional question arises: should not the issue of verifying false information be decompartmentalised in order to ask more general questions about the ways in which such practices fit into the ordinary forms of platformised culture?

37In our research experience, the adoption of a vernacular approach—as digital ragpickers—invited us to stop idealising the figure of a consumer of quality journalistic information, a certain enlightened subject who is still fantasised a priori by institutional and media enunciators. In the details of the investigations carried out on Twitter, we have instead seen subjects confronted with a generic condition of “points of passage” between diverse social discourses (Verón, 1984): what do Internet users actually do? Are they relaying, sharing, reinterpreting or altering these news? From a comprehensive and materialist approach, we find that users shape and put their own marks on diverse forms of content which they know how to interrogate. To conclude, we would like to emphasise the depth of vernacular documentary practices that are being developed and incorporated on Twitter. We have observed contemporary responses and emerging conventions relating to verification practices that involve influential figures and their communities, events and their temporalities, recurring gestures and their technicalities. In this problematic context, we need to pay particular attention to fairly subtle investments, enunciative polyphonies and interpretative conjunctions, as well as to the constant shifts from polemical to parodic tonalities that are played out on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

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Notes

1 « Chère BeAnDaFo, en attendant de définir une meilleure stratégie de collecte, peut-être pouvons-nous documenter ici tant de fakes et de démentis ordinaires et savoureux ? »

2 « Oui documentons ici les fake et démentis repérés sur twitter, mais il faudra penser sauvegarde et format de sauvegarde des données collectées Logorrhées modernes, incontinences numériques qui défilent, sur-inscrites sur notre desk qui pudiquement [s]e cache derrière dans l'obscurité ».

3 « Voici un homme chargé de ramasser les débris d’une journée de la capitale. Tout ce que la grande cité a rejeté, tout ce qu’elle a perdu, tout ce qu’elle a dédaigné, tout ce qu’elle a brisé, il le catalogue, il le collectionne. Il compulse les archives de la débauche, le capharnaüm des rebuts. Il fait un triage, un choix intelligent ; il ramasse comme un avare un trésor, les ordures, qui, remâchées par la divinité de l’industrie, deviendront des objets d’utilité ou de jouissance ».

4 « Coucou @BFMTV la vérité vient de ce monsieur en gilet jaune derrière votre journaliste ».

5 « LES MERDIAS SONT DES LECHES Q à MACRON les FAKES NEW SE COMPTE PAR MILLIERS » (sic).

6 “@DeBunKerEtoiles / Destroyer of conspiracy theories - Fact-checker agency Fact and Furious.”

7 « Les fake news d’hier sont les vérités d’aujourd’hui, pas ma faute ».

8 « Je n’avais pas remarqué mais c’est encore un 👇"Hello my name is firstname bunchofnumbers and I have incredibly shitty opinions" ».

9 « INFO DIRECT Greta thunberg se serait apparement noyée lors de son voyage en bateau pour rejoindre New York afin d'assister au G7 #ripgretathunberg ».

10 « Le 28 Août 2019, Greta Thonberg (sic) est retrouvée morte, noyée, sur son trajet vers le G7 2019, à Biarritz, France RT si c’est triste ».

11 « Une vrai bande de fatigué (sic) #RipGretaThunberg #GretaThunberg ».

12 « Wikipedia ils deviennent fous à cause de votre #RipGretaThunberg ».

13 « Greta Thunberg (...). This article is regularly the target of unwanted modifications and is not freely modifiable ».

14 « #RipGretaThunberg Wikipédia en sueur ».

15 « Ceux qui disent qu’il ne faut pas relayer le #RIPGretaThunberg mais qui le citent quand même et le font donc monter en tendance. Bravo les génies ».

16 « Source ? mec crois moi ».

17 « The international journal of t’inquiète crois moi (sic) ».

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List of illustrations

Caption Figure 1. Exchanges via Direct Message: Charting Genesis of a Thematic Collection on Twitter (Screenshot, 10/12/2018)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-1.png
File image/png, 387k
Caption Figure 2. Criticisms of media outlets by Twitter users (2018-2022).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-2.png
File image/png, 649k
Caption Figure 3. The material existence of “fact-checking” in the form of “red stamps” (2019)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 67k
Caption Figure 4. Figurations of Debunker des Etoiles in his Twitter profile and an article on him in Azerty (n° 5, 11/12/2021)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-4.jpg
File image/jpeg, 35k
Caption Figure 5. An inventory of debunked conspiracies: Screenshot of a table by Debunker des Etoiles (7/1/2022)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-5.jpg
File image/jpeg, 66k
Caption Figure 6. The redocumentarisation of a debunker’s content by a vigilant investigator (15/2/22)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-6.jpg
File image/jpeg, 49k
Caption Figure 7. Fake Death Announcements on Twitter: a research poster on the case of Greta Thunberg (Stalder & Gomez-Mejia, Bobcatsss, 2020)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-7.jpg
File image/jpeg, 92k
Caption Figure 8. Mosaic of verification gestures on Twitter using circled screenshots (2018-2019)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-8.jpg
File image/jpeg, 63k
Caption Figure 9. Mosaic of ironic sourcing verification gestures on Twitter (Dates 2019-2022)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-9.jpg
File image/jpeg, 52k
Caption Figure 10. Mosaic of verification gestures on Twitter via offline-to-online sharing (2021)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/docannexe/image/3326/img-10.jpg
File image/jpeg, 89k
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References

Electronic reference

Angèle Stalder and Gustavo Gomez-Mejia, Verification Gestures by Twitter Users: Media Materials and Vernacular InvestigationsInMedia [Online], 10 | 2025, Online since 01 June 2025, connection on 18 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/3326; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/145d7

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About the authors

Angèle Stalder

Angèle Stalder is Associate Professor of Information Documentation at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (ELICO). Her research focuses on the document, the technical document and information practices and cultures, in everyday, school, and professional contexts.

Gustavo Gomez-Mejia

Gustavo Gomez-Mejia is Associate Professor in Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Tours (PRIM). His research deals with the study of digital cultures and the semiotics of screen textualities. He is the author of Les Fabriques de Soi ? Identité et industrie sur le web (MkF, 2016) and Le Numérique comme écriture (in collaboration with E. Souchier, E. Candel & V. Jeanne-Perrier, A. Colin, 2019.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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