  Online social networks (OSN) play an essential role for connecting people and
allowing them to communicate online. OSN users share their thoughts, moments,
and news with their network. The messages they share online can include
sarcastic posts, where the intended meaning expressed by the written text is
different from the literal one. This could result in miscommunication. Previous
research in psycholinguistics has studied the sociocultural factors the might
lead to sarcasm misunderstanding between speakers and listeners. However, there
is a lack of such studies in the context of OSN. In this paper we fill this gap
by performing a quantitative analysis on the influence of sociocultural
variables, including gender, age, country, and English language nativeness, on
the effectiveness of sarcastic communication online. We collect examples of
sarcastic tweets directly from the authors who posted them. Further, we ask
third-party annotators of different sociocultural backgrounds to label these
tweets for sarcasm. Our analysis indicates that age, English language
nativeness, and country are significantly influential and should be considered
in the design of future social analysis tools that either study sarcasm
directly, or look at related phenomena where sarcasm may have an influence. We
also make observations about the social ecology surrounding sarcastic exchanges
on OSNs. We conclude by suggesting ways in which our findings can be included
in future work.
