Stop Sharing Political Memes
They are a doorway into stupidity and misery.
Modern politics has always been replete with issues about which people feel passionate, sometimes aggressively so. But the culture wars currently raging in the US, Canada, and across much of the industrialized West seem to be particularly fraught. In my 50-plus years, I have never seen so much anger and hostility among citizens of otherwise stable countries. Some of these people will participate in protests or engage in civil disobedience, but many more will employ the political meme to express their discontent. Given how widespread the phenomenon has become, itās worth asking whether political memes actually advance advocacy goals and our knowledge of important issues, or if they simply feed an unconstructive cycle of anger, misinformation, and polarization.
The term āmemeā was coined by Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe units of culture, socially transmitted and imitated across generations in ways synonymous with genesāadaptive ideas survive, while maladaptive ideas perish. But in the social media age, the word usually refers to āan image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users often with slight variations.ā The subset of memes that focus on politics are generally designed to boil complex issues down to a digestible combination of emotive image and sloganeering text that flatters those who agree with its message and provokes those who do not.
Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (ātoxicā is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them āone of the main vehicles for misinformation,ā and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view beingāinaccuratelyāmocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder. Of course, itās possible to construct a meme that is short yet still thoughtful and sophisticated, but these are few and far between.
The best evidence we have today is incomplete and limited, but it suggests that political memes have a net negative effect on society. If the idea is to persuade or advance practical advocacy goals, then there is little evidence that they work. To the contrary, they may be counterproductiveāthe evidence we do have suggests that they contribute to political polarization, distort issues in the name of political expediency, and provoke indignation, hatred, and intolerance (on both sides of the political spectrum). Yes, the available evidence is fragmentary and would certainly benefit from better and more open science designs. However, it accords with larger observations about social media and political polarization. Perhaps new and better research will reveal that alarm about the negative effects of memes is simply another moral panic comparable to those that arose around video games or smoking in movies. But since memes add almost nothing to public discourse that would offset the risks, itās probably worth hesitating before sharing them.
During my time on social media, Iāve noticed that many of the people who complain about our political and cultural polarizationāand social mediaās role in it, specificallyānonetheless gleefully participate in one of the more evident examples of its toxicity. These arenāt random anons on the Internet, but mainly Facebook friends Iāve known and liked for years. Until perhaps five years ago, they seemed like intelligent and rational individuals without melted brains. Iāve sometimes engaged with meme sharers in an attempt to glean a sense of their motivation, but these exchanges are seldom productive. People get strangely protective of memes, and become much more defensive when challenged than if an op-ed theyāve shared is disputed. Longer form communications seem to be open to rigorous but respectful debate in ways that memes are not. It doesnāt appear to matter whether one attempts to debate the content of the meme itself, or the practice of sharing memesācriticizing a meme can feel tantamount to insulting someoneās child.
This may be partly because political memes invariably flatten political and ethical complexity into binary narratives of good and evil. They are cast as profound moral statements signaling allegiance to the in-group, and so they are meant to attract approval (likes, reshares, and praise) not discussion or objections. Certainly, many op-eds are partisan garbage, but political memes are a compact version of all that is wrong with modern discourse. To suggest that someoneās virtuous declaration is actually just the kind of spiteful dishonesty they say they deplore in opponents is likely to produce significant cognitive dissonance. The most common retortāthat itās ājust a jokeāāis unsatisfactory. Bipartisan memes can also be funny, but the whole point of the political meme is to deride and humiliate. They are bullying dressed as humor.
Another common response is āThey did it firstā or āThey deserve it,ā the kind of argument we are taught is irrelevant in kindergarten. If the other side has misbehaved, how does it help to respond with the same kind of misbehavior? āI am playing them at their own gameā and āholding them to their own standardsā is a poor and self-serving moveāonce you participate in the game according to those standards, they become your standards too. The upshot is a downward spiral of mutually destructive conduct in which the only motivation is to outdo an opponent. In psychology, blindness to oneās own faults and hypersensitivity to an opponentās (even when they are identical) is called myside bias. And this is particularly prevalent in the tribal warfare waged on social media.
Political memes are calls-to-action, and they offer a cost-free means of engaging in advocacy that requires very little of the individual in terms of time or resources. But in that sense, they represent a kind of faux-advocacy because thereās little evidence that they do much to effect real-world policy change. If anything, the derision and complacency in which they trade almost certainly turns potential allies off. That just leaves the true believers to like and recirculate such content within an increasingly conformist echo chamber. The incentives are perverse.
Political memes are most likely ignored by most of the populace, or at least those who are not perpetually online. But they serve as a cheap kind of holy writ for the obedient foot-soldier on the Right or the Left, further circumscribing their ability to think critically or acknowledge the possibility of error. You canāt be a good Republican unless you believe Democrats want to steal every election. You canāt be a good Democrat unless you believe Republicans want to create a fascist state modeled on The Handmaidās Tale (and yes, I know some people reading this are crying āBut they do!ā).
Political memes are basically a doorway into stupidity and misery. Seeing a fair number of people I know and respect walk through that door has been a depressing but eye-opening experience. But these poor unfortunates are rubes: victims of a business model centered on stoking outrage and conflict. We need to find ways to understand our opponents better. They are, after all, our fellow citizens. We could start by taking a straightforward step in the right direction: Stop sharing political memes.
