Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America

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Memetic Irony and the Promotion of Violence within Chan Cultures– Blyth Crawford, Florence Keen, Guillermo Suarez de-Tangil

Memes may be all the rage in these heady days of digital trending, but they’re not a new thing. Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term in his popular 1976 book The Selfish Gene, scientists have been putting memes under the microscope. The "cotton" meme appeared on April 25, 2022, when explosions occurred in a military unit and an oil depot in Bryansk, russia. The news of this event, translated from russian sources using online translators, was published online. The translator confused the homographs, which resulted in the news story saying that "a powerful cotton was heard before the fire started". The visual aesthetic and functionality of memes as a form of communication has been used strategically by the extreme right. Extreme right-wing movements have used memes to condense complex, radical ideologies into a more appealing and ‘palatable’ format that can be disseminated effectively online, reaching broader audiences on mainstream platforms.Creating a viral meme is a science and it has its formula, according to Nazarenko. The ideal meme meets the following criteria: It should center on a popular topic, be witty yet easy to understand, and reflect society’s attitudes toward certain issues. There are thousands of channels that repost the same news from each other. We stand out — we create jokes for each piece of news. Until February 24, virtually all news except those that cannot be joked about were published with memes. When the war broke out, there were fewer reasons to joke, so there were fewer memes with the news. But there is still something to joke about,” he explains. Visit Ukraine Hotelis a search engine where you can easily and affordably book a hotel in a number of Ukrainian cities. That would be the worst-case scenario for social media users such as Masha, who hopes loopholes to access social media channels and news outlets via VPN won’t get taken away within Russia, especially as international platforms provide an alternative stream of information about the war in Ukraine and play a major role in keeping alive any form of Russian anti-war movement. Like many young Russians, Masha feels shut off from the rest of the world but is afraid of what a more robust digital curtain could bring. Despite their usefulness for pro-Kremlin propaganda, the internal shutdowns of western social media platforms will undoubtedly affect how mainstream Russian society understands the country’s actions in Ukraine.

Though this type of content has outraged those who see it as propaganda, users supportive of the government line will continue to interact with it and share it, no matter how obvious the staging. The aim is to polarise Russia even more – and it’s working. At this point, the Ukrainian Army decided to stop advancing toward the city because of heavy losses. Most of the frontline positions were abandoned and replaced by fortifications. Meanwhile, the separatist forces didn’t make any significant progress either. VisitUkraine.Today is the unique information portal for tourists traveling to Ukraine and Ukrainians planning a trip abroad. There’s even a field dedicated to their study: memetics considers how certain cultural artefacts go “viral”. Mentally and socially “ contagious”, memes provide immediate, visual expressions of our common humanity as they jump from brain to brain. Companies such as mobile operator Kyivstar, postal services Nova Poshta and Ukrposhta, e-commerce platform Rozetka, and electricity supplier Yasno have also mastered the art of communication via memes.

The viral success of memes has led governments to try imitating the genre in their propaganda. These campaigns are often aimed at the young, like the US Army’s social-media-focused “Warriors Wanted” program, or the British Army campaign that borrows the visual language of century-old recruiting posters to make fun of millennial stereotypes. These drew ridicule when they were launched earlier this year, but they did boost recruitment. With the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1990, the fears of a new major conflict subsided until recently, where both old participants of previous wars and newcomers to the scene are flexing military muscles in ways the previous World Wars found impossible. Memes failed to sway the French citizenry, as several commentators have noted. But France’s meme wars demonstrated the transnational influence of the so-called “ alt-right” hate groups that managed to transform Pepe the Frog into a racist mouthpiece and, in doing so, set a precedent for future memetic wars. The alt-right rises online Since the outbreak of hostilities in 2022, Ukrainians have created many war-related memes. Some of them have become part of modern folklore. Like songs and poems, memes help Ukrainians express their feelings in simple metaphorical language.

Novynach is not the only project of Igor. He is also the author of the Regionality telegram channel, which publishes funny news from the regions, and a volunteer of SUVIATO, a union of war participants, disabled and war veterans, founded in 2014.It would be easy to cast all blame upon the form of the meme, to decide that memefication is a process that inherently corrupts good discourse and only serves as a vector to misinformation.