• “At least X is better than Z”: Humor as wartime public diplomacy on Twitter/X by Ukraine

With the emergence of wars in the digital era, states and militaries have appropriated memes and humor as tools for public diplomacy on social media. This goes against traditional logic where carnivalesque internet humor does not fit with wartime state communication, which demands professionalism and unity. Can humor be an effective way to conduct public diplomacy in a wartime situation? Multimodal discourse analysis is used on 179 tweets posted by the official Ukraine Twitter/X account within a year of Russia’s invasion to understand how humor is used for strategic communication and to what extent they are an effective public diplomacy strategy. I demonstrate that humor is not only often used in an aggressive manner in a wartime context, it is also an effective tool to generate virality. Applications to other recent conflicts open the door to larger questions about the intersection of informality and perceived power.