Social Media, Memetics & the Propaganda Cycle

Call it fake news, biased opinion, alternative facts or straight up lies; there is a real problem in this country that most people are not paying attention too. A propaganda cycle that lies deeply embedded in our Social Media habits. It has not stopped after the 2016 election, and more elections are coming up in 2018.

While Social Media has historically been taken lightly as harmless entertainment, it is becoming more apparent with every tweet President Donald Trump posts that Social Media has also had a significantly adverse effect on our politics and culture. It’s time to take a more in-depth look at how propaganda embedded in Social Media becomes consumed as fact without any checks and receipts.

One of the most critical and overlooked tactics used to create a tribal cultish culture war is using memes in a tactic called Memetic Warfare. Memetic Warfare is a tactic that has used meme imagery to trigger and change public opinion that would otherwise move in a progressive direction. The theory works by showing the general public at certain imagery that will trigger them emotionally into changing their views. It divides public opinion away from fact and can turn politics into a spectator sport. When an imaginary world was created for “shit-posting lords” called Kekistan, the active players in this environment would call it “Meme Magic”. Google any of these terms, and you will find perfect examples of Memetic Warfare.

For example, the Pepe the Frog memes were popular for many years in neutral ways. By 2016 during the election, Alt-Right provocateurs co-opted the meme and added subtle hints of their own fascist ethnostate agenda. This turned a popular beloved meme on 4Chan into an Alt-Right champion in which many young adults followed for pure entertainment.

The Alt-Right would subtly make light of authoritarian tactics like throwing people who are against their ideology out of helicopters. In many cases, they showed vehicles running over protesters with cars in cartoonish fashion long before Heather Heyer was hit by a car during a protest against an Alt-Right rally called Unite the Right,  in Charlottesville, VA.

In some memes, inaccurate statistics focused on black-on-black crime in Chicago, subtly attempting to drive a point that black people are inherently violent and do not belong in a white ethnostate. Claims that Muslims are here to rape men were as simple as a grotesque cartoon. American racism and bigotry were unearthed in memetic battle all across Social Media platforms.

Propaganda articles and Podcasts are also part of a Memetic Warfare strategy. Pushed by anyone eager for money without any moral issues about spreading propaganda, media personalities can quickly take on a right-wing celebrity status with the right formula. The articles and podcasts reinforce the Memetic messaging and explain to an emotionally charged following how they must act and who they should trust, further enforcing a close-minded echo chamber.

Social Media personalities can go from shit-posting memes, to writing articles filled with lies within minutes. If they gain enough popularity, they eventually become contributing commentators on Fox News or hosting their video podcast show complete with budgets for a production team. They tell their who to vote for, propping up certain politicians who will most likely push their will. They also engage their audience to take action against President Donald Trump whenever he states a compromise against their will. The issues with DACA and immigration are a perfect example of that. In these days this is how a minority group can end up running the country.

Many of them, like Lauren Southern, travel and act as if they are journalists attempting to capture, edit and narrate a live-action scene in a way that further proves their points.

A sort of mass gas-lighting technique emerges where these media personalities will enforce their propaganda as truth even when it is mostly made up or exaggerated to trigger emotional fear and outrage. These right-wing Social Media personalities tend to work together on a coherent message. Even after they publicly fight against each other on specific issues, they will later work together on other issues because they understand their real enemy is the Progressive Left and Liberals. Even when people do not subscribe to a political side if they do not agree with the ideology they are labeled Liberal or Leftist. Right Wing propaganda tends to focus on the same message on any given day, nailing in their propaganda as fact while claiming anyone who stands in their way as true villains. Much of what these media personalities are doing is extraordinarily unethical yet actively effective.

Memes and propaganda have not always been so apparent in its intentions. It can target any demographic despite coming from one group of interest. Corporate Marketing is based on the same techniques when it comes to displaying specific images over a short time repeatedly to trigger a need for their product.

To most people, on the surface, memes can seem like no more than an immature joke or an image that moves someone emotionally for good. Many people think of memes as a witty way to make a point. Ordinary people want stabilization of society yet does not think much of subtle imagery in a country were Freedom of Speech rules. Memetics requires disruption of all popular culture to advance change in social structure. What ordinary people do not do is take the time to reflect on the effects of images and propaganda continually appearing even for a few seconds can do to one’s mind. If you see a picture enough for just a few seconds every day, it will become a normalized image in your mind over time without taking much thought into it. It becomes a part of your subconscious making that one image appears fact in your mind regardless if it is true or not.

The use of Memetics in these modern times has been used to farm and develop a fascist autocracy throughout the Western World today. It also helped groups like ISIS recruit members from all around the world. Going into how Memetics works can be a far more exhaustively complicated process that it needs to be. A shorter simpler explanation can be this; memetics is a psychological marketing tool used to change people’s perception of reality in a way that can sway and change a culture and entire societies. It uses marketing tricks like gathering as much data as possible of a target audience/demographic. It then uses that data to understand how to psychologically influence a group of people’s perspective. With that persuasion, entire culture based groups can move in a different direction in a society like a puppet moved with strings by its memetic puppet master.

Contemplate for a second where most memetics and propaganda is pushed. Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, in particular, has received a tremendous amount of scrutiny for helping Russia pay to post fake news and fake protests to cause a divide. While many people would blame Russian for the massive amount of disinformation pushed on Social Media, many of the social media personality types that push fake news articles and propaganda are American. Many of these Americans are working with other propaganda personality types from around the world, in particular, the UK and Canada.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram, all of these social media platforms have not only allowed for a free range of propaganda to be sold to the masses. They also take in every aspect and detail of our lives and sell that information to corporations who also sell the information to politically motivated groups. It is especially helpful to political parties for them to know who to target. When a special interest group understands what your interests are, what motivates you emotionally, they also know how to target an audience effectively.