Memetic Warfare And Its Effects On Us

If you’ve scrolled on Instagram reels enough, you’ve encountered posts calling Sombr “spiritually Israeli” or photoshopping Charlie Kirk into popular images. These posts, while seemingly harmless and meant to entertain, have done damage. Memetic warfare as a term was coined by Jeff Giesea, a controversial investor who campaigned for Trump in 2016 using memes. He described memetic warfare as “a subset of information operations or psychological warfare tailored to social media.” 

It works so well because a meme doesn’t explicitly ask you to agree with a position; rather, it first asks you to get the joke, and then to understand the underlying premise behind it. By the time you’ve laughed, you’ve already accepted the premise. Repeated enough times, it does two things at once: it desensitizes you to the discomfort you would normally feel about violence and cruelty, and it nudges millions of people toward a sort of ideological conformity. 

The goal of memetic warfare has never really been to win an argument. Instead, it is to decide what is taken seriously and what is taken as a bit, ultimately blurring the line between the two until nobody can find it anymore. A decade ago, this was the domain of anonymous message boards and occasional trolls, and the content revolved mostly within its environment of origination. Now, the same mechanism runs through the feeds that everyone from your group chat to the White House uses every day. 

It’s become increasingly successful at its goal. At the height of the aftermath of the Epstein files release, it felt like social media was flooded with Epstein-related content. Every day, there would be a new update about something somebody had found while scouring the files or a new victim speaking out about their experiences. While there was a sensible amount of genuine regard for this news, much of the response was also turned into Create Mode posts with would-you-rather questions. The files, which implicated some of the most powerful people in the country in something monstrous, got the shelf life of a trend. The jokes burned through the public’s attention in a few months, and when the format got stale, so did the story. The people named in those documents could not have designed a better eventual outcome if they had tried.

In a political climate full of anxiety and uncertainty, it is logical that people seek out humorous ways of digesting uncomfortable or horrible news. Humor works incredibly well as a delivery mechanism because it launders whatever it carries. If I post evidence arguing that a political figure is corrupt, you can disagree with me, and you might. If I post a meme implying the same thing, disagreeing makes you the person who can’t take a joke. There is a structural imbalance here as well: The meme makes its claim in a single image, but anyone who wants to push back on it needs a paragraph, a source, and your attention span. Regardless, by then, the meme has already been reposted a thousand times.  “Edgy humor” is also effective because it inherently builds a sort of community around it, thereby reaffirming your own beliefs. You laugh, you open the comment section to see who else laughed, and you feel good about yourself because you have a good sense of humor and have found other people who do too. Furthermore, because the post reached you through people you already trust, whether it be a page you recognize or mutuals in the post’s likes, it arrives feeling verified. The in-group is defined by the joke and the out-group is defined by a lack of understanding. That is a far more durable form of persuasion than organized evidence. 

Governments have utilized this technique for a while, but we’ve seen it appear in plain sight more recently. For most of modern history, political power both online and off belonged to whoever controlled distribution. That advantage has eroded; what matters now is who can shrink an idea down small enough to travel on its own. President Trump is known for creating AI-generated images and videos of his political fantasies, whether it be “Trump Gaza” or Obama being arrested. Obviously, these aren’t policy proposals, and nobody is meant to read them as such. But they are jokes with a clear direction, backed fundamentally by his worldview. Each one he posts makes an outcome that would have once been unthinkable feel a little more like something you’ve already seen. The response is also well worth considering. A shift in what people are willing to accept tends to show up in what they’re laughing at well before it shows up in a poll, a bill, or an executive order.

Particularly following the release of ChatGPT’s DALL-E in 2023, the cost of producing this type of content collapsed to virtually nothing. Before, a convincing photoshop or cartoon took someone with skill and an afternoon, but now, it merely takes a sentence. This is consequential because memetic warfare has always been a volume game and the volume just became unlimited. When an image can be generated faster than it can be fact-checked and shared faster than it can be generated, the question of whether it’s real or not stops being relevant to its effect: It only has to be funny enough to repost once. 

I am certainly not the fun police and I’m not going to act like I find none of these posts humorous, particularly if the underlying sentiment does align with my beliefs, but the people and institutions producing this content at scale are not doing it to be funny. They are doing it because it works, and it works best on the people who think they’re in on the joke. An essay asks for ten minutes whereas a meme asks for one second, and in a contest between those two, there is almost no version where the essay wins. So, the question becomes how we can still hold onto the kind of attention that a joke can’t carry: the slow and unshareable kind that a trafficking ring or a war or capitalist criticisms actually deserve. Even though it becomes much harder to make that go viral, we must decide that it’s worth doing anyway.

Shloka Bhattacharyya is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at sbhattachary@wesleyan.edu.