Sarcasm in verbal and nonverbal communication is known to attract higher attention and create deeper influence than other negative responses. Many people are adept at including sarcasm in written communication thus sarcastic comments have the potential to stimulate the virality of social media content. Although diverse computational approaches have been used to detect sarcasm in social media, the use of text mining to explore the influential role of sarcasm in spreading negative content is limited. Using tweets during a service disruption of a leading Australian organization as a case study, we explore this phenomenon using a text mining framework with a combination of statistical modeling and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Our work targets two main outcomes: the quantification of the influence of sarcasm and the exploration of the change in topical relationships in the conversations over time. We found that sarcastic expressions during the service disruption are higher than on regular days and negative sarcastic tweets attract significantly higher social media responses when compared to literal negative expressions. The content analysis showed that consumers initially complaining sarcastically about the outage tended to eventually widen the negative sarcasm in a cascading effect towards the organization's internal issues and strategies. Organizations could utilize such insights to enable proactive decision‐making during crisis situations. Moreover, detailed exploration of these impacts would elevate the current text mining applications, to better understand the impact of sarcasm by stakeholders expressed in a social media environment, which can significantly affect the reputation and goodwill of an organization.

中文翻译：

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发现讽刺在社交媒体回应中的影响

众所周知，口头和非语言交流中的讽刺比其他负面回应更能引起人们的关注并产生更深远的影响。许多人都善于在交流中包含讽刺意味，因此讽刺的评论有可能激发社交媒体内容的病毒性。尽管已使用多种计算方法来检测社交媒体中的讽刺，但使用文本挖掘来探索讽刺在传播负面内容中的影响作用仍然有限。在澳大利亚一家领先组织的服务中断期间使用推文进行案例研究，我们通过结合统计建模和自然语言处理（NLP）技术的文本挖掘框架来探索这种现象。我们的工作目标是两个主要成果：量化嘲讽的影响，并探讨对话中话题关系随时间的变化。我们发现，服务中断期间的讽刺表达高于正常日子，与字面的负面表达相比，负面的讽刺推文吸引了更高的社交媒体响应。内容分析表明，消费者最初对停电产生了讽刺的抱怨，最终倾向于扩大负面的讽刺情绪，从而对组织的内部问题和战略产生连锁反应。组织可以利用这些见解来在危机情况下进行主动决策。此外，对这些影响的详细探讨将提升当前的文本挖掘应用程序，