Beyond social polarisation: Memetic (de)legitimisation and quasi-legitimisation of non-fungible tokens

This paper contributes to the nascent research on Internet memes examined as items of (de)legitimising discourse, its empirical focus being memes addressing NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The mystifying NFT trade became hype in 2021, attracting massive media coverage and stimulating heated discussion across social media, which includes memetic content production. This study explores the multimodal discourses of (de)legitimisation in NFT memes. Based on a dataset of relevant 993 memes extracted manually from an automatically generated corpus of 1628 Twitter memes, a deductive-inductive multimodal analysis proves the original dichotomy (underlying the polarised views expressed through memes) insufficient. Seven memetic patterns dictated by (de)legitimisation stances are identified. In addition to NFT-legitimising and NFT-delegitimising categories, ambiguous equipotential (de)legitimisation memes, two categories of memes with blended (de)legitimising stances and two categories of elusive-stance memes are distinguished. The notion of ‘quasi-legitimisation’ is proposed to capture the memetic categories that normalise the thorny concept of NFTs.