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Memes and politics refers to meme as a graphical communication medium that is largely implemented for uses related to politics, such as political campaign, propaganda, activism, or public discourse. The historical use of visual media for political purposes dates back to World War I, where propaganda posters and advertisements were first recognized as a significant tool to deliver cultural, political, and social beliefs and values to the masses in a print format.

Today, with the rise of information and communications technology (ICT), Internet memes are having a growing influence on political opinions and public discourse. According to Pew Research Centre, 67% of American adults receive the majority of their news from social media sites. Furthermore, 86% of American millennial primarily view diverse political opinions on digital platforms. These numbers indicate that online users are influenced by political memes when surfing on networks. The key is that the nature of web 2.0 social media applications heavily involves user-generated content (UGC) and the sharing of UGC, which embraces the concept of "participatory culture".

Definition of meme

 * Main article: Meme

Richard Dawkins first introduced the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins defines memes from a biological perspective, as he asserts that memes, like genes, are cultural units that transmit, imitate, and replicate quickly in a society. During the process, competition and selection occur among different memes, and only the final winners get stored and circulated from mind to mind.

In Dawkins’ latter book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he further expands upon a meme as an information unit stored in people’s minds that influences certain events, so that the information can be duplicated and spread in other people’s minds within a very short time. As such, the selection among successful memes is based on how much of an impact it has on an event. Richard Brodie, the author of Virus of the Mind, clarifies this definition by giving the example of yawning. Brodie says that although yawning is contagious, it is a behaviour instead of a meme because it does not have any influence on events.

While many people use the term “meme” interchangeably with “viral”, Limor Shifman distinguishes something that is viral as “a single cultural unit” that is mobilized in a high volume, whereas a meme is “a collection of texts”. For instance, a popular video can become viral only when it has one version, and user involvement only appears on its meta-comments, and it has no derivatives. On the contrary, a meme can have many versions, and one of the versions or all of the versions can gain popularity. Users can participate by modifying the text, and the focus of derivatives is either on a specific photo or video or on a certain formula, such as LOLcat s.

Types of meme
Most scholars refer to memes as visual memes, which are images or videos that are widely circulated on the Internet as “a piece of cultural information”. Visual memes are commonly known as Internet memes. Often an original picture or video that is spread online, visual memes can also be repackaged through mimicry or remixing. For example, the original meme “Charlie Bit My Finger” was remixed by adding another image, text, or soundtrack by Internet users. Also, many users imitated Charlie and his bother to deliver their own messages. Other researchers also identify non-visual items, such as a hashtag, mention, URL, and phrase as meme types when investigating information diffusion on social media platforms. Often, both visual memes and non-visual memes are used together in one strategy.

Memes in politics
Political memes are the combination of humour and serious messages that expresses the masses voice of their worldview in a normative debate. Yet, a study by CNA indicates that memes are considered the most powerful tool to communicate messages with audiences during political campaigns due to it has various advantages. First of all, memes are better methods than texts when deliver complex messages. This is because a meme can contain multiple layers of meanings by remixing or mimicry, and readers can quickly convey the underlying messages. Secondly, several studies find that our cognition ability can be easily inspired through visual indicators than texts because our brain works more productive as an image processor rather than a word processor. Lastly, audiences tend to give more emotional responses to “both offensive or appetitive" visual images ..

Uses in persuasion, action, and discussion
Limor Shifman suggests that political memes can serve three functions. Firstly, memes can be used for purposes of "persuasion or political advocacy". In the case of Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign, memes were extensively spread all over the Internet and successfully contributed to influencing the campaign. Moreover, a CNA report suggests that U.S. government (USG) influential campaigns should adopt memetic engagement as a complementary and supplementary strategy to productively diffuse information across cultural and national barriers and to increase the effectiveness of communication for diplomatic and military purposes.

Secondly, memes can be used for grassroots action with two types of logic: "collective action” and “connective action” . Collective action is a more traditional and formal structure that requires organizations to offer financial, educational, and social resources to support and encourage individuals to participate in political movements. While collective action is mainly organized by offline social groups, “connective action” is powered by social media users with diverse and personalized voices. The content, ideas, and criticisms shared by individuals on social networks are the keys in connective actions, and all types of memes are significant in conveying messages through political activism.

Lastly, memes can work as forms of political expression and public discourse. Because memes are easy to access and spread, cheap to produce, and an entertaining way to represent one’s political voice, they have become a popular medium for "polyvocal expression" and negotiation in recent political activism. Memes function in the same way in both democratic societies and non-democratic societies. For places like China, where the online environment is heavily censored and monitored by the platforms and the state, image memes are vital for Chinese social media users to express their political opinions.

2008 Obama Campaign
Political campaigns have been micro-targeting specific voters since the 2004 United States presidential election. However, the 2008 Barack Obama campaign brought micro-targeting to the next level through the use of big data analytics, which allows content to be delivered to more segmented audiences through social media. In this process, memes played a vital role as a form of audiovisual content for this micro-targeting strategy during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.

A research study found that the most popular video clips during the 2008 presidential campaign process were composed of edited footage created by nontypical political actors, such as the “Obama Girl” (crush on Obama), “Wassup”, and “Yes We Can” videos. For instance, while there were 55,000 views on party-sponsored ads and about 60,000 views on candidate-sponsored ads, 139,000 views were generated on interest-group-sponsored ads, about 807,000 views on citizen-designed ads, and more than 2.5 million views on ads made by various news and media entities. These successful nontraditional viral video creators, often either interest groups or news or media entities, can be seen as established organizations that were both financially and socially supported.

Another factor that made the Obama campaign successful was the amount of attention generated around those videos on the Internet by Obama campaign members and bloggers. After these videos were created, statements given by campaign members led the public to actively discuss the videos in the blogosphere. In the meantime, the clips also received massive media coverage. Similarly, political bloggers also contributed in spreading the content through the discussion of such viral media. Ultimately, the 2008 Obama campaign used memes as part of its visual influence campaign to “persuade” the public.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Movement

 * Main article: Occupy Wall Street

The 2011 Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest movement that physically took place in Liberty Plaza Park in the financial district of New York City demonstrates how Internet memes can help to expand the public sphere and enrich public discourse. The OWS movement increased both national and global awareness of financial inequality issues in America. It was a participatory democratic event in which the protesters in the movement were all leaders who insisted that everyone’s issues are equally important. Though this movement integrated hashtags, common phrases, repackaged videos, and image memes together as ways to express public perceptions, image memes that used satirical humour were the most effective media content that inspired “hope for broader public discussion”.

As opposed to traditional media, memes in this movement functioned as participatory media that created prosumers, who consume and produce media content on social media platforms. This feature has led to what Ryan M. Milner describes as “polyvocality”, meaning that various discourses are encountered online in the format of image memes, and social media platforms have become the new public sphere, and this sphere is broader than ever.

“Being harmonized”
Internet censorship in China makes China a special case when it comes to public discourse. In the name of creating a “harmonious society”, the Chinese government has blocked certain content searches and websites and monitors all types of platforms , such as Sina Weibo and WeChat, as well as restricts netizen s in China to have access to international media platforms , such as Twitter and Facebook. As a result, Chinese netizens employ satirical image memes as a form of subversion. For instance, “being harmonized” in Chinese were censored keywords because many people were using this phrase to complain about how the content they have shared online has been removed or how websites that have discussed critical issues have been shut down by the authorities because they touched on sensitive topics. Chinese netizens quickly adopted the phrase “being rive crabbed”, which has a similar intonation as “being harmonized”. This pun, however, is written in different characters, so it will not be filtered by the censorship system. In the meantime, Chinese Internet users produced an image meme of a crab that was widely spread at that time. This became of a way for Chinese people to express their opinions about the censorship policy in a humorous way.

In Ethan Zuckerman's cute cat theory of digital activism, he explains that such uses of humorous memes allow members of the public to create content that is irrelevant to political controversy but still can implicitly contribute to activism because visual content is difficult for the government to detect. Shifman suggests that political memes in such contexts are more than a way of showing anger and frustration and represent a “powerful display of criticism and distrust”.

The “flaunt your wealth” challenge
The “flaunt your wealth” challenge, or “falling stars” challenge, was one of the most popular social media trends in 2018, in which people take pictures of themselves pretending they have fallen over on the floor with their face down, and their valuable belongings are strewn around them. In China, this challenge went from people simply showing off their wealth to people from all fields showing their professional lives. The Chinese government saw this social media trend as an opportunity to communicate positive energy with the public, and local governments posted pictures in the same style as the “flaunt your wealth” challenge. For example, one image posted by an official fire department’s Weibo account had a Chinese fire fighter lying down on the ground surrounded by his working tools, and another picture had a fire fighter falling over the awards and honours he had received from work. These pictures were seen as part of a soft propaganda strategy to promote “socialist values” in the public, demonstrating how only hard work is considered as truly valuable to society rather than money or power.

Other types of memetic engagement in politics
The CNA study took an epidemiological approach and concluded that visual memes can have three intended effects on campaigns: “to inoculate, to infect, and to treat.

Inoculate
Inoculation occurs when memes are used as a way of resisting a threat or potential attack from another party. The core message the memes want to deliver is to address “delegitimizing or undermining — a message or attack expected from another actor”. In other words, such memes are used to make a threat or attack from another party have less impact on the public.

An example given by the CNA is how Japanese citizens responded to the Islamic State. In the beginning of 2015, ISIS sent a video requesting $200 million from the Japanese Government as a condition to release two Japanese hostages Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa. In this video, ISIS also encouraged the Japanese public to put pressure on their government to save the two lives within 72 hours. The Japanese public responded to this threat by using a combination of a hashtag campaign (#ISIS Crappy Photoshop Grand Prix) and a visual memes campaign. The memes circulated at that time were mainly screenshots from the video that ISIS sent to the Japanese government. These visual memes applied the remix mechanism by adding elements either from Japanese video gaming, Kawaii or Japanese anime that made the memes more culturally specific or referenced more universal elements, such as Star Wars, LOLcat, and well-known politicians. In the end, the mocking response from the Japanese public with hashtags and memes did not save the two men, and this eventually became one of the ISIL beheading incidents. This campaign, however, successfully inoculated the Japanese people and undermined the influence that ISIS could have had on the nation. For instance, a Japanese citizen tweeted that “Tomorrow will be sad but it will pass and #ISIS will still be a big joke. You can't break our spirit” in reference to the deadline for the ransom money.

Infect
Infection involves diffusing information with memes that can make a point, either positive or negative. The messages being articulated through these memes usually have broader goals, such as representing a value or challenging an institution.

As an example, the Indonesian non-profit organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) collaborated with the University of Vienna to directly fight against ISIS’s violent extremism in 2015. Yet, NU’s mission statement states that it aims to promote a positive Islamic ideology that is anti-violent and embraces all religions. In 2016, 500 NU members took action in disrupting ISIS’s online propaganda by adopting visual memes as their major weapons. One of the memes says “It’s not important what your religion is … if you do something good for all mankind, people will never ask you” on the top part of the image, and the bottom part of the image says “Yes, religion keeps us away from sin, but how many sins do we commit in the name of religion?”. The goal of this online movement was to infect the general population with a moderate Islam value called Islam Nusantara, which is in contrast to the aggressiveness of ISIS.

Treat
Treat occurs when visual memes are used to respond to a message that is already widespread in society or on the Internet, “by mocking, disproving, or otherwise countering”. This could be exemplified in the photoshop war the U.S. Embassy used in response to false information that was reported by the pro-Russian news outlet REN TV.

On September 20, 2015, REN TV released an image showing that the U.S. ambassador John F. Tefft was on the scene of an opposition rally in Moscow, with a claim indicating that the opposition meeting was more memorable because of the appearance of the Ambassador. This report is significant because it delivered two messages to the public. On one hand, Tefft seems to have a connection with the opposition movement. On the other hand, the image implies that the U.S. government is a supporter of ths event, since Tefft is a member of the U.S. embassy. Shortly after, the U.S. embassy claimed the image was fake and that it had been photoshopped by REN TV, and they decided to respond to this report on Twitter by using visual memes, hashtags, and mentions. For instance, the U.S. embassy listed four pictures on Twitter: the original picture, the picture that was circulated by REN TV, and two pictures the U.S. embassy photoshopped to mock this fake story. Along with the four pictures, the U.S. embassy used a headline that was translated into “Ambassador Tefft spent yesterday’s weekend at home. But thanks to Photoshop you can be anywhere. #fake”. Later, the U.S. embassy’s Twitter account posted three tweets, and each attached a meme that placed Tefft in different locations, and “mentioned” REN TV (@rentvchannel). This event showcased how the use of memetic response is not only limited to citizens or organizations. In this case, the U.S. embassy as a government representative chose to deploy memes to treat the REN TV disinformation with significant success, as their memetic posts regarding this event were retweeted 10 times more than REN TV’s original report. In the meantime, this Photoshop war also generated enormous media attention in Russia, the U.S., and Europe.

Echo Chamber
Many concerns related to political memes are associated with the concept of the echo chamber (media), in which the nature of social media platforms could actually lead members of the public to become “political extremists”. In today’s society, audiences’ reactions are mostly “feeling-based”, meaning that people believe statements that feel right to them, and they ignore facts they do not like. With the echo chamber, internet users are more likely to see memes that interest them and are being targeted by disinformation campaigns without being exposed to both sides of a story. Thus, their political views tend to be more biased, which is not healthy for a democratic society.