Memes Are Becoming the New Language War
The new language of memes is a complex and yet ever-changing form of communication. While being used to provide simple forms of humor they can also bring about a more dark and sinister side out of people. On March 18, 2019 an unnamed attacker opened fire in the Al Noor mosque in New Zealand. Following the attack, the gunmen’s manifesto was leaked to the public. The manifesto which was a 74-page book was dedicated to the support of the far-right movement. His manifesto was intended to illicit reactions from the public, some of his content including far-right supporting memes that he also used to try and entice others to follow his ideals.
This new age of technology brings about a new form of communication. Specifically, for the right-wing population, the use of politically motivated memes as a form of propaganda is a new field of strategic communication. One common linkage between this new rise in propaganda related meme culture is the site Facebook. Facebook has long since had issues with the content that is spread on the site.
Facebook plays an important role in recycling far-right talking point and keeping that general side active within the platform. These pages do a good job of actively posting extremist content, and also exploiting tragic events in the news cycle, using images of veterans, and anti-immigrant rhetoric for likes and shares. Although Facebook has policies in place to target these sorts of bait like posts, right wing propaganda and as well as pages have actually been growing. The site however has started taking a head on approach on combating this online form of propaganda however they are still constantly falling short of what it actually takes to combat these issues.
Since this new implementation however studies are showing that traffic flow to these sites are constantly increasing. In a study done by Media Matters they compared both right and left leaning pages and found that the right centered blogs received roughly 60 million weekly interactions while those that were more left centered received roughly 13 million less.
Now when it comes to right-wing memes most of them have a similar pattern that they all ultimately follow. For example, when it comes to anti-immigrant memes, they usually follow the same set of criteria which consist of talking points about undocumented immigrants using government resources, vague and false allegations against undocumented immigrants.
Now where do all these right-winged charged posts and affiliations come from? According to the article in Media Matters again most of these posts are just regularly circulated throughout the many different social media accounts. They’re often passed from account to account until they end up on a Facebook page to be shared with the public. On top of these there are specific pages such as The Patriot Federation, The Liberty Eagle, National Liberty Federation. that are dedicated to producing this type of content and are therefore constantly contributing to this new meme machine of sorts.
These new pages and forms of open propaganda are creating a dangerous environment for both the political and general climate. In the New York Times article by John Herrman, we see exactly how big this ever-churning machine is actually becoming. We learn that approximately 200 million people in America alone visit Facebook on a monthly basis, of those roughly 44% of Americans read or watch the news that comes up on Facebook. On top of that some of the more well-known propaganda ridden pages almost have a following as large as news corporations like CNN or The New York Times.
Overall the new age of Meme culture is bringing about a new and dangerous era. People are ever constantly being tricked by the so called “credible” news that is shared online and are falling victim to the falsehoods being shared. Politicizing memes is without a doubt a smart but deadly way to get ones message across. Because what better way is there then to throw out a few viral memes and see your message spread out from screen to screen?
