Memes and propaganda: Making propaganda entertaining

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  Quantumrun Foresight
• September 19, 2022

Insight summary

Propaganda has shifted from leaflets to social media memes, evolving from early innocent jokes to complex, subtle tools for swaying opinions on topics like politics and social issues. Memes effectively communicate ideas and feelings, leveraging humor and repeatable visual templates. Their use could lead to significant consequences, including the development of AI-generated content, increased studies on meme propaganda, and collaborations between governments and social media to manage their spread and impact.

Memes and propaganda context

Propaganda materials once flooded the streets in leaflets, but now they flood social media. Internet memes have now become the new "leaflet" propaganda. They thrive on shares, likes, and comments and use humor to communicate their messages. 

Memes have drastically evolved since the early 2000s. Most early meme jokes were innocent and uncontroversial. When cell phones were not yet sophisticated enough to play YouTube videos, platforms like Reddit and 9GAG let users browse through pages of mindless entertainment like memes. It wasn't until the late 2000s that memes rose to prominence. 

Memes take various forms; they are often animated Graphics Interchange Formats (GIFs), videos (including those found on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube), photographs (particularly those seen on websites like 4chan and Reddit), and image macros. This form of communication tends to be a standardized customizable visual template with one or two sentences to convey an idea or feeling. They are repeatable, visually appealing, and often make people laugh.

Over time, templates became more recognizable, and memes turned into something more profound and subtle. Their capacity to communicate complex concepts quickly and effortlessly is now being utilized to change audiences' opinions, perspectives, and viewpoints. Artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks can now create meme content depending on the data they are fed. These memes are often designed to turn people against a political party, a person, an ideology, a belief system, and even fundamental truths.

Disruptive impact

A team of researchers from universities, including King's College London and Sapienza University Rome, studied 950 memes collected from Facebook accounts to understand how memes are used as propaganda.  The researchers discovered that the memes were primarily concerned with political themes such as the COVID-19 pandemic and gender equality, two of the alt-right's primary obsessions. Continued research highlighted recurring techniques that meme authors have found successful: 

• One of the typical propaganda techniques applied to memes is appealing to fear or prejudices, which attempts to support a concept by creating anxiety and panic among the public towards an opposing idea. 
• Another technique utilized is a causal oversimplification, highlighting just one reason why an issue or event occurred when these topics are typically highly complex. 
• A less well-known method is thought-terminating cliches or phrases that end critical thought and sincere conversation about a specific topic. 
• Whataboutism involves the act of responding to an accusation by claiming that a different offense committed by another person is similar or worse; this method is similar in style to discrediting an opponent by accusing them of hypocrisy instead of disproving their argument. 
• Finally, there's the black-and-white fallacy or the belief that a problem only has two solutions. 

According to the researchers, the most common propaganda techniques used in their pool of memes are smears or loaded language (63 percent and 51 percent, respectively) and name calling or labeling (36 percent). 

Implications of memes and propaganda

Wider implications of memes and propaganda may include: 

• Increasing studies on meme propaganda and how to combat them, particularly among universities and anti-fake news agencies, to help educate the public.
• Using deepfake technology to create multiple versions of memes.
• Social media platforms investing in algorithms that can detect fake news content, including memes, and automatically deleting them. However, this feature will cause a backlash among users. 
• More state-sponsored propaganda meme campaigns.
• Increasing employment opportunities for meme creators.
• Accelerated development of educational modules in schools focusing on media literacy and critical thinking skills, enabling young people to better discern the truthfulness of online content, including memes.
• Enhanced focus on ethical standards in AI development, leading to algorithms capable of distinguishing between satire and misinformation, reducing the spread of harmful content while preserving freedom of expression.
• Increased collaboration between governments and social media platforms to formulate policies that strike a balance between censorship and freedom of speech, impacting how memes are shared and regulated.

Questions to consider

• How can memes be used to build communities?
• How do you equip yourself to better identify meme propaganda?