2023-04-102023-04-102021DIAS, Luiza Álvares; DAMASCENO-MORAIS, Rubens. Simulacro de argumentação: o meme como neutralizador do conflito no Twitter. Percursos Linguísticos, Vitória, v. 11, n. 28, p. 43-63, 2021. DOI: 10.47456/pl.v11i28.35150. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufes.br/percursos/article/view/35150. Acesso em: 5 abr. 2023.e- 2236-2592http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/handle/ri/22284In 2018, political polarization made social networks a stage for discussions/dissensions regarding Brazil’s politics. Despite this, the virtual world allows the exchange and exposure of opinions. In some conflicts, we observed the use of humorto alleviate or inflate disagreement. In this article, we extract a dialogue from the social network Twitter in which the humor was materialized in a meme, imagery or audiovisual material that has humorous content and is characterized by becoming “viral”, quickly shared by the largest number of people on the internet. Thus, the objective of this qualitative research was to analyze the function of the memein this episode. For that, we used the dialogical modelof Plantin (2016), in which the interaction is essential for the existence of a conflict/stasis. With that, we verified the presence of stasis, but the memecontent blocked the argumentation progress. Supported by Bergson (1983), we realized that humor couldbe an efficient rhetorical resource in a political context, in this case, to intimidate (SANTOS JUNIOR, 2017). The use of the memeas a way toprevent the argumentprogressionmakes us thinkthat, instead of space to (de)construct ideas, social networks are becoming virtual fighting rings.porAcesso Abertohttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Modelo dialogalMemeConflitoRedes sociaisEstaseDialogical modelConflictArgumentationSocial mediaStasisArtigohttps://doi.org/10.47456/pl.v11i28.35150