ABSTRACT
Internet platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have, for example, revolutionized the ways with which news is produced and consumed. News stories or events with positive emotional content are more likely to be passed on because sharing such content makes recipients feel good and helps build or maintain the sharers’ positive images. Other scholars in the field of communication have suggested more detailed models to account for virality in the media. The Israeli communication scholar Limor Shifman presents what he calls the 6P model of virality, describing different features that may account for why a media event can go viral. The term internet meme refers to multimodal signs consisting of images and texts in which both visual and textual elements are somewhat altered to create a new meaning, but leaving some elements to retain the original signs’ recognizability.
