Identity theft with parodic purposes in the social network Twitter: verbal expressions of impoliteness?

In this exploratory study we focus on fake profiles created on Twitter, whose purpose seems to be threatening the face of public figures and celebrities. Following a sociocultural pragmatic approach, we investigate the main face work strategies adopted by the administrators of these profiles and verify whether the messages they publish have negative effects on the mocked public figure, the administrator or the listeners' faces, being an expression of impoliteness. The qualitative analysis of a corpus of 5030 tweets leads to the conclusion that parody in this context has a negative effect on the public figure's face, but, at the same time, it strengthens the social ties with followers.