In the document he posted online, [the Buffalo gunman] specifically credited [American neo-Nazi and white supremacist website] The Daily Stormer and its memes for having changed his views and political positions.
Produce: Memes
This quote isn’t meant to be THE defining quote on memes in this article (the whole thing is about memes) – it just seemed like an appropriate opener:
“To understand the idea of memes, you need to understand the idea of copying, varying and selecting. Now, one look at Internet memes, and there it is, full on,” Blackmore said. “Any information that we copy from person-to-person counts as a meme — our culture is made of memes.”
Below are some quotes which help us understand the efficacy of memes in spreading information disorder:
Memes are quick and easy to create
Pre-Internet, it was mostly people with money, power and influence who created what we now call memes, and media gatekeepers like newspapers, magazines and television stations catapulted them into popular culture. It was regulated. Restricted. And slow.
In the Internet age, it costs little money or skill to create a savvy meme and share it with the world. The only gatekeepers now are friends and followers who, with every like and share, boost a meme’s algorithmic ratings and the spread, scope, success and impact of that meme.
Internet memes started as reaction images, jokes and niche references on message boards and forums in the 1990s. By the late-2000s, instant meme generator websites like IMGFlip allowed people with zero photo editing skills an easy way to create memes, which evolved with the Internet to become more layered, nuanced and diverse.
Slow moving agencies like the government find it difficult to counter rapidly created harmful memes
Experts told USA TODAY that memes are so easy to make and disseminate that it’s nearly impossible to smother harmful content in the cradle.
Nina Jankowicz, an expert on the intersection of disinformation and technology, lamented that government officials have been slow to counter false narratives that develop and spread online.
“The processes that government tends to have to go through to communicate just are ill matched to respond at the speed that the Internet works,” said Jankowicz
Online hate groups have meme style guides
The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi and white supremacist website launched in 2013, had a style guide for new writers, according to a leaked copy posted online, that encouraged the use of memes and humor to appeal to a younger audience and advance its racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and Islamophobic theories.
Memes make hate speech more palatable
“If you are more subtle in your critiques, if you’re just asking questions, if you kind of hide behind this veil of irony and joking, then it makes the ideas more palatable — the idea being that it kind of becomes more of a gateway to these more earnest beliefs,” Milner said.
Successful memes get your attention, and get you to pass them on
“What makes for successful memes is anything that will first get your attention and second, get you to pass it on,” said Blackmore, “The Meme Machine” author. “It’s no good just getting your attention, because if you just go, ‘Oh, wow, that’s great,’ that’s the end of that meme, at least that branch of the tree of life of that meme. So all these memes that have succeeded are because they found something in our genetic makeup and our learning and our culture that enables them to get in there and stay.”
Harmful memes are take advantage of your biases
“The thing about media manipulation and disinformation is it’s meant to trick you,” Donovan said. “It’s designed in such a way so as to sometimes bring out some of your biases. To some degree, I think we’re all vulnerable to these kinds of campaigns.”
Social media platforms are designed to encourage engagement with memes
Equally important are the platforms on which these memes spread. Social media sites use algorithms to decide which content to display on users’ personal feeds. The more time spent looking at, sharing and commenting on anti-vaccination content, for instance, the more of that content these sites will serve.
These algorithms are designed to increase user engagement, which is profitable for the social media companies that host such content, but they also send people down rabbit holes of disinformation, reinforcing a feedback loop until lies become truth, Milner said.
One popular meme format threatened violence against Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Trump’s campaign used memes to rally supporters and attack opponents in a way no other candidate had done.
Amplify: Narrative amplified by influencer
Donald Trump Jr. reposted a meme to Instagram in August to comment on — and poke fun at — the FBI raid of Mar-A-Lago, suggesting that its purpose was to rifle through Melania Trump’s underwear drawer. The meme is a gif from the television show “That ’70s Show” and depicts a character joyously throwing piles of panties into the air. The text added to the image states: “Feds in Melania’s closet.”
Calibrate: Use “Algospeak” to avoid automated content moderation
Memes can be created anonymously, they’re distributed with the push of a button and can go viral as they’re shared among people who may not even understand the source or true intent of the message. These attributes make them hard for social media companies to fact-check or flag with an algorithm. For example, the hashtag #SaveOurChildren was initially associated with the false claim that LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, a narrative linked to the baseless QAnon conspiracy that Democrats and “global elites” are running a child sex trafficking operation. When Facebook censored the hashtag, users adopted a new one — #SaveOurChildrenNow — which yields similar results as the original.
Impact: Create distrust in legitimate narrative; Create beneficial inauthentic narrative
Within hours of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Aug. 8, memes posted on Twitter racked up thousands of retweets. On Reddit, some memes garnered tens of thousands of interactions, according to an analysis performed at the request of USA TODAY by Meltwater, a social media monitoring company.
After the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, a flood of memes were created and shared on social media. The meme on the left was created to falsely suggest that President Joe Biden orchestrated the action against Trump. The one in the center is in a “fashwave” aesthetic utilized by far-right extremists and calls for “revenge.” The meme on the right likens the FBI to the Gestapo and warns that “they’ll come for ALL of us. And soon.”
An analysis […] found several right-wing narratives associated with the FBI search told through memes that blossomed after news broke of the Mar-a-Lago investigation. These memes, meant to sow distrust and disdain towards the investigation, were propelled on Twitter and Facebook by influential figures such as Donald Trump, Jr., while also spreading on platforms like Gettr, Gab and Truth Social, according to the analysis.
The analysis found seven key narratives among the most popular memes, all of which were supportive of Trump or critical of the Department of Justice. Those memes cast the DOJ’s search as an example of fascism, corruption, incompetence or simply an excuse to rifle through Melania Trump’s clothes.
By the time U.S. government officials pushed back three days later on claims that the FBI and DOJ had acted improperly, a subset of public opinion had already formed. The statements and formal remarks made by Wray and Garland had already been eclipsed by humorous and more sinister narratives shared via hundreds of online memes.
“People on places like 4chan, or like accelerationist groups who are really scary bad extremist actors, they call this meme warfare,” Sara Aniano, a meme researcher and disinformation analyst at the Anti Defamation League Center on Extremism. “Some people are like, ‘We don’t need to use violence. We have memes.’ And they use the 2016 election as an example of how they used meme warfare to win.”
After listing these new Impacts I want to call out that not all listed DDB tags will be winners – but I think it’s OK to try things and see what works. It’s accurate that the article states that the memes create distrust in the true narrative, and perhaps if we tag lots of reporting about ways people chip away at trust in true things, we’ll see how they manage to do that.
Impact: Kinetic Impact > Inspire Terrorism
On a Saturday afternoon in May, an 18-year-old man parked his vehicle outside the Tops Friendly Markets grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. He got out and started shooting.
[…]
In the aftermath of the racially motivated hate crime emerged a 180-page document the gunman had published that chronicled white nationalist talking points. Among its pages were dozens of memes and infographics selected to illustrate and support the “great replacement” theory – the baseless idea that white people are being replaced by people of color as part of an organized scheme to oust them as the dominant race.
The memes that fueled the Buffalo gunman’s extremist ideas are not unique. His hate-filled document largely cited and drew from a similar one published in 2019 by the white supremacist who massacred 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
A transcript of a private Discord server run by the Buffalo gunman shows that memes were the gunman’s way of communicating, normalizing and integrating hateful rhetoric. They laid out a narrative for others to adopt the same sinister ideals. The server — which acted as the gunman’s private diary and was made public shortly before he enacted his killing spree — featured hundreds of memes along with other misogynistic, racist and homophobic iconography.
In the document he posted online, [the Buffalo gunman] specifically credited [American neo-Nazi and white supremacist website] The Daily Stormer and its memes for having changed his views and political positions.
Impact: Promote extremist ideology
Both documents [(manifestos posted by Buffalo and Christchurch shooters)] highlighted memes as a key component to indoctrination into the white nationalist ideology and included the same call to action: “Whilst we may use edgy humor and memes in the vanguard stage, and to attract a young audience, eventually we will need to show the reality of our thoughts and our more serious intents and wishes for the future… Create memes, post memes, and spread memes. Memes have done more for the ethno-nationalist movement than any manifesto.”
Impact: Rift in community
During the campaign for the 2016 presidential election, Internet trolls used memes to sow discord in a hyper-polarized political climate. At the same time, Russian agents used memes in the form of stylized grassroots-like Facebook ads to create further dissension among American voters. Trump’s campaign used memes to rally supporters and attack opponents in a way no other candidate had done.
Narrative Theme: White Supremacy
Both the frog and the flag — each associated with a fictional country called ‘Kekistan’ — are Internet memes that have come to represent ironic, tongue-in-cheek symbols of white nationalism. Although their origin stories are bizarre, they are emblematic of how messaging on the fringes of the digital world has made the leap into real-world instances of violence, underscoring the importance of recognizing the implicit and explicit threats they can represent.
Narrative Theme: Antisemitism
Memes play a key role in almost every disinformation campaign of the digital age and feature prominently in the hate-filled screeds of mass shooters and in the playbooks of far-right operatives
On a Saturday afternoon in May, an 18-year-old man parked his vehicle outside the Tops Friendly Markets grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. He got out and started shooting.
[…]
In the aftermath of the racially motivated hate crime emerged a 180-page document the gunman had published that chronicled white nationalist talking points. Among its pages were dozens of memes and infographics selected to illustrate and support the “great replacement” theory – the baseless idea that white people are being replaced by people of color as part of an organized scheme to oust them as the dominant race.
Narrative Theme: Anti-LGBTQ+
Memes can be created anonymously, they’re distributed with the push of a button and can go viral as they’re shared among people who may not even understand the source or true intent of the message. These attributes make them hard for social media companies to fact-check or flag with an algorithm. For example, the hashtag #SaveOurChildren was initially associated with the false claim that LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, a narrative linked to the baseless QAnon conspiracy that Democrats and “global elites” are running a child sex trafficking operation. When Facebook censored the hashtag, users adopted a new one — #SaveOurChildrenNow — which yields similar results as the original.
Narrative Theme: Elections
These two Facebook ads, which were posted in 2016 by Russian operatives, were archived and published by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. One compared Hillary Clinton to Satan and suggested that Jesus favored Donald Trump. The other promoted the baseless conspiracy theory that former president Barak Obama is a secret Muslim and a “traitor” who “betrayed America.”
“People on places like 4chan, or like accelerationist groups who are really scary bad extremist actors, they call this meme warfare,” Sara Aniano, a meme researcher and disinformation analyst at the Anti Defamation League Center on Extremism. “Some people are like, ‘We don’t need to use violence. We have memes.’ And they use the 2016 election as an example of how they used meme warfare to win.”
Narrative Theme: Misogyny
“This was an online movement that wanted to challenge identity politics, wanted to challenge women in particular, people of color, by claiming that they had some kind of marginalized status because they were gamers online,” Donovan said. “Kekistan came to embody this geekdom that then took it in a whole other direction when they started to work together and collaborate and coordinate and do different kinds of harassment campaigns. And they started to be talked about as their own nation by these very marginal, far-right influencers.”
Narrative Theme: Anti-Vaccine
A meme that circulated during the COVID-19 pandemic falsely indicates that biologist William Campbell supports using the horse deworming drug ivermectin as a viable COVID cure. Campbell publicly refuted the meme in Sept. 2021. Memes concerning ivermectin and anti-vax movements have been potent sources of misinformation.
The intention of this series is to make it easier to understand why the article has been tagged with particular tactics or techniques. Associating reporting of real-world attacks with DISARM tactics and techniques helps us get a better understanding of how they have practically been used, who’s used them, and who they’ve been used against. To do this a relevant quote from the article will be provided under the title of the associated technique. If the technique exists in DISARM, then its identifier will be included too.
