Meme warfare
Using shareable, remixable images and jokes to carry a political message, so that the audience spreads the message for its humor and absorbs the claim without ever meeting it as an argument.
A meme is a slogan with a picture and a punchline, built to be copied. It compresses a claim into a format that is funny, fast, and anonymous; it invites the audience to remix and repost it, so that the spreading is done by the audience and the origin disappears; and it is immune to rebuttal, because answering a joke seriously loses the exchange. The message rides inside the humor, and the audience, laughing, adopts the frame.
The term "memetic warfare" appeared in NATO strategic-communications writing in 2015, and the 2016 U.S. election made the practice visible: online communities produced and distributed political memes at industrial scale, and state actors did the same. Shifman's study of internet memes describes the medium; Phillips and Milner describe the ambivalence that makes it hard to police. Exploits Humor Effect and Cognitive Ease.
Historical examples
Jeff Giesea's article in NATO's Defence Strategic Communications journal, "It's Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare," argued that memes were a weapon of information war that Western militaries were ignoring, and cited the Islamic State's use of them in recruitment. The piece gave the practice its name in policy circles a year before the election that made it public.
Giesea, Jeff. "It's Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare." Defence Strategic Communications 1, no. 1 (2015): 67–75.
Online communities produced and coordinated political memes during the 2016 campaign at a scale that reached mainstream coverage, and the Internet Research Agency's accounts, the Senate report found, relied heavily on the format, posting image macros on race, religion, guns, and immigration to millions of followers. The Anti-Defamation League's 2016 designation of a cartoon frog as a hate symbol, in some contexts, marked the medium's arrival as propaganda.
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2. Washington, 2019; Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
In advertising and commerce
Brands adopted the format as "meme marketing": jokes in the vernacular of the platform, posted from corporate accounts and designed to be reshared as if from a friend. Trade studies of the practice report higher share rates than conventional advertising and the same benefit: the message spreads with the brand's fingerprints softened.
Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Take three political memes. For each, write the claim it makes as a plain sentence. Would you accept the sentence without the picture?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
An image of the candidate with a caption comparing her to a cartoon villain has been reposted 200,000 times. Nobody knows who made it.
What to notice. A claim carried inside a joke, spread by the audience, authorless, and immune to rebuttal.
"Relax, it's just a meme," replies the account when asked whether the statistic in the image is real.
What to notice. The format's defense: the humor shields the claim from scrutiny.
The same template, with the same joke about the policy, appeared on forty unrelated accounts within an hour of a coordinating post.
What to notice. Coordinated seeding of a remixable format; the meme's spread is organized, then organic.
Sources
- Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0262525435
- Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. The Ambivalent Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. ISBN 978-1509501274
- Giesea, Jeff. "It's Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare." Defence Strategic Communications 1, no. 1 (2015): 67–75.