By Scott DeJong

The tidal wave of information that came crashing alongside COVID-19 has become known as the ‘infodemic’ (Mina, 2018; United Nations, 2020; Zarocostas, 2020). One of the many concerns connected to the pandemic was the extensive sharing of conspiracy theories, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. Social media sites have tried to respond, with giants like Facebook attempting to combat the misinformation that is running rampant on their platforms (Jin, 2020). Others, like fact checking service snopes.com, have been tirelessly addressing misleading posts and articles that are coming across people’s screens (Echter, 2020). 

Memes are no exception to these issues. Using templates that recontextualize images from popular culture, meme makers have exploited the meme format to propel narratives that might be misleading or downright incorrect (Castañeda Jr, 2020; Motta et al., 2020; Smith & Graham, 2019). While sometimes grouped together under the concept of fake news, researchers distinguish between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation when considering non-factual information circulating online. According to Wardle and Derakshan (2016), “misinformation is information that is false, but the person who is disseminating it believes that it is true [while] disinformation is information that is false, and the person who is disseminating it knows it is false.” (p. 44). Finally, malinformation is, “information that is based on reality, but used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country.” (ibid. p.44). Knowing the difference between these terms helps us understand how memes act within the infodemic space.

Mis-, dis-, and malinformed memes

In our sample, some pages adopted a sceptical, or even oppositional, stance to stay-at-home orders and the threat of COVID-19. The most common concerns that were embedded in these memes revolved around the economic impacts of the pandemic and government power. While these concerns might be valid, they are quickly coupled with unverified claims that question the validity of news reporting about the novel coronavirus and subsequently downplayed concern for COVID-19. 

Memes with unsubstantiated rumors about the nature of a public health crisis run the risk of being exploited for detrimental claims about the appropriate medical response. Milner and Philips (2017) argue that memes encourage quick audience participation, which over time can expand and invite users to participate in a meme group. Over time, users can become more agreeable to the content that is shared in the groups they are part of. Other studies have furthered these claims, such as work by Smith and Graham (2019) which discusses how users in anti-vaccination groups engage in a variety of content across similar pages, making them more susceptible and agreeable to the proposed content. Critically, meme content is posted without citations or references provided to substantiate claims (see Figure 1). In this manner, memes can act as ways to engage the community on a page, where other content and material can further complement misleading memetic messages.

Our findings resonated with a recent study by Brennen et al. (2020) which found misinformation about the coronavirus circulating as “reconfigured content” where “true information is spun, twisted, recontextualized, or reworked” (Wardle 2019 as referenced in Brennen et al. 2020). They argue that reconfigured content has “higher engagement than content that was wholly fabricated” (Ibid.). Our current findings echo this claim. However, this creates a challenge in ascertaining if the memes creators are intentionally doing this (disinformation) or if they are spreading information they think is true (misinformation).

Memes, as Joan Donovan (2019) explains, have been taken up alongside propaganda initiatives where a “kernel of truth” makes it easier to pull off hoaxes through public sharing of content. For instance in Figure 1, while digital contact tracking by governments is a legitimate privacy concern, this image of Trudeau was posted on meme pages alongside text that implies a Liberal hidden agenda to surveil Canadian citizens while simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of the carbon tax. Figure 2 provides another example, placing the risk of COVID-19 on a pedestal below a mix of other legitimate health concerns and jokes from the hit show Tiger King. The meme presents true health issues in the form of a joke that attempts to dismiss the threat of the virus. 

Generally, memes are being presented without sources, which makes their message hard to check for some users. Rather, the meme’s rhetoric becomes consistent with the meme page they were posted on. As Figure 1 and Figure 2 show in their discussion on surveillance or delegitimizing COVID-19, their goals are intentional. The page’s goals for posting content alongside twisted and reconfigured memes (Brennen et al., 2020), would classify these memes as disinformation sources. This finding matches with other scholars (Brennen et al.; Castañeda Jr, 2020) and reinforce the importance of following memes as communication mediums. While some of the anti-Trudeau pages that we track might also come close to malinformation by intentionally presenting incorrect statements about Trudeau, the majority of content we examined appears to be disinformation.

Conspiracy

In some cases, disinformation expands into conspiracy, where issues of public concern are presented alongside conspiratorial claims. As exemplified by Figure 4, such memes casually further conspiracy theories around e.g. “mind control” and “5g causing cancer” by placing them alongside legitimate concerns about wealth inequality and poverty. According to a study from Reuters, this interplay of accurate and inaccurate information is commonplace as it obscures the difference between fact and fiction (Brennen et al., 2020).

We are finding evidence to support the claim made by Motta et al. (2020) that right-leaning groups have been more active in the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 than liberal or left-leaning ones.  In our sample, we have found that statements which delegitimize news sources or push conspiracy narratives only appear on two of our tracked meme pages.

As the above memes show, these pages present a narrative that accuses the media of having  ‘created’ the pandemic (Figures 3 and 5) and of overplaying the virus’ severity, therefore allegedly proving that they are unreliable sources of information. For instance, the upper panel of Figure 5 references a scene from “The Matrix” where individuals are offered a red or blue pill, a popular right-wing reference that has been recently picked up by pro-Bernier groups around making themselves “aware” of “mainstream media lies”. This is juxtaposed with a lower panel image of Michael Scott, the protagonist of television sitcom “The Office”, whose characteristic buffoonery is meant to support the meme’s overall message. 

However, it is important to note that conspiracy is still discussed on pro-Liberal and pro-NDP pages. But instead of supporting them, the pages posted memes which mock the conspiracy theories that are circulating in right-wing memespace. During the middle of May, when discussion about the pandemic was at its highest, the pages shared memes which made fun of certain conspiracy groups (Figures 6 and 7). Many of their memes referred to so-called Malthusian theory about population growth and control.

Conclusion

Our preliminary findings suggest that creating and sharing memes is a communicative practice whereby pro-Bernier groups gradually integrate conspiracy theories about COVID-19 into their memetic repertoire. While these groups also shared text and screenshots of news articles with captions that aimed to support their claims, memes contained the majority of misinformation or conspiracy claims. This reminds us of the possibilities of visual arguments to create relationships and connections. As our current findings show, memes provide an approachable template for discussing ideas and presenting opinions, including conspiracy theories. The meme groups we are tracking have used this to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy, especially discrediting Canadian news outlets in order to support alternative agendas. Meme’s generate conversation, which is picked up by other pages who react to popular ideas that are being discussed on meme groups across the Canadian political spectrum. This disparity in dialogue across meme groups, emphasizes the importance of following memetic conversations and the variety of opinion being taken up around different issues, whether it is true or false.

References

Brennen, S., Simon, F., Howard, P., & Nielson, R. (2020). Types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Castañeda Jr, J. (2020). Memes of Misinformation: Federal Spending: Unraveling the controversial, socio-economic and political issues behind those annoying social media memes. Vernon Press.

Milner, R. M., & Phillips, W. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity.

Mina, N. G., An Xiao. (2018, August 30). How Misinfodemics Spread Disease. The Atlantic.

Motta, M., Stecula, D., & Farhart, C. (2020). How Right-Leaning Media Coverage of COVID-19 Facilitated the Spread of Misinformation in the Early Stages of the Pandemic in the U.S. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423920000396

Smith, N., & Graham, T. (2019). Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 22(9), 1310–1327. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406

United Nations. (2020). UN tackles ‘infodemic’ of misinformation and cybercrime in COVID-19 crisis. United Nations; United Nations.

Wardle, C. (2016, November 18). 6 types of misinformation circulated this election season. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/6_types_election_fake_news.php

Zarocostas, J. (2020). How to fight an infodemic. The Lancet, 395(10225), 676. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30461-X

As the novel coronavirus became front and centre in people’s lives, it is no surprise that internet communities were impacted by it as well. Public groups, social media pages, and community spaces became flooded with discussions on the COVID-19 pandemic. Posts about cures, data, new information, and the proper way to wear a mask and wash your hands are a few of the themes that users saw across their screen throughout these past few months.

By Scott DeJong

In our work tracking Canadian political meme pages on Facebook and Instagram, we noticed that these groups quickly integrated the pandemic into their discussions. Political meme pages have held true to their initial objective. Anti-Trudeau and anti-Liberal pages are still using memes to attack the Prime Minister’s character, question the party’s policies, and promote conservative ideology (see below). Meanwhile, pro-Liberal and pro-NDP groups still call for social reform and attack right-wing ideology while displaying varying levels of support for government responses to the pandemic. The pandemic has thus become the backdrop for  the messages that meme formats and humour communicate to their audiences. 

Attacking the Liberals and Trudeau

Holding true to their political partisanship, conservative-leaning groups contextualized their memes around COVID to continue making attacks against liberal policy. Figure 1 highlights the common conservative framing of welfare recipients as undeserving or lazy (Redden, 2011), and the Liberal governments’ Canada Emergency Response Benefit is mocked as overly generous. Posts like this were found across meme pages, where conservative groups used public concern and government responses to the pandemic to attack liberal or NDP ideology. Posts from anti-Trudeau and pro-Conservative groups also exploited the early stress on supply chains and public fear about shortages as attacks against socialist ideology.

Ideology isn’t the only thing being memed. COVID-19 can just as easily be leveraged to attack a leader. In our sample, this leader is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mainly from anti-Trudeau meme groups, posts attack Trudeau’s character and past blunders but contextualize them around COVID-19. As an example, Figure 2 presents four images of the Prime Minister in relation to recent purchasing limits at stores. In one image, Trudeau wears a ceremonial headdress bestowed to him by the Tsuut’ina First Nation (CBC News, 2016). Directly below it Trudeau appears in brownface, an infamous scandal from the last election. Even though these images depict markedly different moments of cultural (in)sensitivity, the memes bring them together to suggest that Trudeau will wear anything to avoid rationing at Walmart — or at least that’s the joke. Schill (2012) describes this relationship between image and political messaging as the enthymematic function of visual arguments, where disconnected political ideas are brought together through visual rhetoric. In short, memes become the scaffolding to recirculate attacks on Trudeau’s character and sincerity.

Social reform and attacking the Right

Unlike the memes typically found on the conservative pages, pro-Liberal and NDP memes typically used common meme formats rather than create their own meme. These templates reference popular culture such as Spongebob (see Figure 3). However, in some instances the format itself, rather than the message of the meme, became the subject of controversy. For example, during the Black Lives Matter protests, a pro-NDP page posted a meme using a common format that features musician Drake (Figure 4). Commenters immediately called out the post, critiquing the use of Drake’s image due to sexual harassment accusations against the artist. While the commenters still appreciated the overall message of the meme, they were clear in standing against the use of the chosen meme format to communicate it. In this case, the initial poster eventually edited their post to apologize for using the format.

 In left-leaning coronavirus memes, the targets were not just political leaders. Figure 5 shows a common meme template used by a pro-liberal meme page to humorously highlight the perceived ideological hypocrisy of anti-vaccine proponents, referencing the consistently disproved claim that vaccines cause autism.

Memes from pro-Liberal and pro-NDP groups maintain a rhetoric that either attacks conservative ideology (like the reference to trickle down economics in Figure 3), or attempts to call for more comprehensive social reform. The latter aspect has recently become more prominent with discussion and support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

While some pro-NDP groups offered minor critiques of Justin Trudeau, their pages are less likely to attack individual politicians but instead critique the conservative or liberal ideologies as a whole. In doing so, the pages also push their own political convictions, such as being pro-vaccine.

Conclusion

Since the meme pages in our sample existed prior to the pandemic, they had already constructed an audience around a constitutive type of humour. As Milner and Philips (2017) discuss, memes invoke a constitutive humour with their audience, establishing an us-versus-them mentality. With the pandemic becoming a societal concern after these meme pages had already established their audience, it makes sense that these groups continued the work of maintaining partisan bonds. While not necessarily tied to specific political parties, the pages still maintain a distinct political agenda connected to certain partisan ideologies. Our findings confirm existing literature that highlights how political humour can be a “vehicle for serious political engagement” (Davis et al., 2018, p. 3912).  As early memes show, political tropes have not disappeared with the arrival of COVID-19. Rather, political meme groups have adapted and created content that frames the current situation through previously articulated positions and critiques. 

References

Davis, J. L., Love, T. P., & Killen, G. (2018). Seriously funny: The political work of humor on social media. New Media & Society, 20(10), 3898–3916. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818762602

Milner, R. M., & Phillips, W. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity.

Redden, J. (2011). Poverty in the News. Information, Communication & Society, 14(6), 820–849. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.586432

Schill, D. (2012). The Visual Image and the Political Image: A Review of Visual Communication Research in the Field of Political Communication. Review of Communication, 12(2), 118–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2011.653504

This post discusses how we research memes. Studying memes has been an iterative process for our team. Since we started in September 2019, we have revisited our methodology numerous times to effectively develop a mixed methods model. Our work was focused on political memes, which meant we prioritized the collection and analysis of memes from partisan communities that supported a particular political group or ideology. 

By Scott DeJong

Defining a meme

The definition of a meme is somewhat contested. We worked with Milner and Philips (2017) who define memes as “evolving tapestries of self-referential texts collectively created, circulated, and transformed by participants online” (p.30). While recognizing that this definition includes video, sound and text memes, for the sake of collection and analysis we chose to gather text-based memes. Importantly, the definition understands memes as re-contextualized cultural artifacts, which highlights the importance of participants in the meme-making and circulation process. In this manner, memes are not simply combined images and text, rather they are invoked within a community process where the audience and creators are in conversation. For example, our project has focused on meme groups and pages on social media. These are specific online communities that conceive of the content they produce as memes. Often this is indicated in the name or handle by mention of memes or memetic “dankness” (Moody-Ramirez & Church, 2019).

Each meme page that we included in our analysis had a clear target audience in mind. By conceiving themselves as memetic, the creators of the pages indirectly make all content that is posted a form of satire. The context of the page can make information a “meme”. A prime example is the Facebook meme page Justin Trudno. The name immediately informs audience members that it is an anti-Prime Minister Trudeau page that posts content that enforces this sentiment. The page is clearly targeting non-Liberal voters and, through memes, engages audience members in discussion.  

Considerations

We had been studying memes since the 2019 Canadian federal election and wanted to clarify our methods for the project, especially as we have since expanded our meme research to include content related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We started by considering the different roles in the space that we wanted to explore. Shifman (2014) argues that as researchers, we need to understand the different positions around a post alongside the meme, specifically considering “the ways in which addressers position themselves in relation to the text, its linguistic codes, the addressees, and other potential speakers.” (p. 40).  Her argument stresses the importance of considering the multiplicity of positions that create the memetic conversation and of exploring a memetic community, not just individual posts. For us, this meant recording comments and general conversation on the page alongside the actual meme. 

Milner and Philips (2017) offer a similar line of argument with their notion of ‘constitutive humour’. They posit that memes use humour to develop a specific in-group and to establish an ‘other’ that either does not understand the humour or is directly mocked by it. As researchers, this meant we had to consider who was ‘in’ the in-group and who was excluded, ourselves included. Recognizing that we are positioned as audience members in relation to these memes, our methodology made space for our own personal reflections and thoughts on the subject matter, which allowed us to explore our own bias and subjectivity in relation to the content.

Based on these considerations, we followed an ethnographic approach, spending time journaling and exploring the meme communities. Concepts like visual ethnography (Pink, 2007) initially seemed like a good fit, however considering that memes are repurposed and recontextualized across different partisan meme communities we turned to the idea of netnography. We drew on Kozinets’ (2010) work on netnography that considers how netnography can be used to explore community discussion, focusing on the content that is being shared and how it is taken up within the group. He specifically discusses the notion of consociality writing: “consociality is about ‘what we share’, a contextual fellowship, rather than ‘who we are’, an ascribed identity boundary such as race, religion, ethnicity or gender. The two forms are distinct and, even though one can shade or lead into the other, we should be careful not to systematically confound them.“ (Ibid. p. 11). Since memes exist as elements of community discussion, it is important to consider not just the memes being shared but the other content, conversations and discussion that is occurring on the page. 

Our current methodology

In an effort to contribute to understanding the pandemic as communication and cultural studies scholars, we decided to implement these ideas into a meme collection methodology. With a smaller team we revisited our initial 21 political meme pages and did a historical review back to their first posts about the coronavirus in late February 2020.Then we chose five pages from Facebook and five from Instagram (see table below). Starting in May 2020, we dedicated an hour or more to each of these pages per week. During this time, we took screenshots of memes, comments, and content, and evaluated what issues were pertinent to the page over the course of that week.  After the first two weeks of collection, we revisited our chosen meme groups. Realizing that some did not post very frequently, we added two more meme groups (included in the above numbers) and began tracking the lower frequency post groups bi-weekly. 

Netnography proposes taking observational notes. Connecting this with work on diary as a method (Berg & Düvel, 2012) we decided to keep a journal about the research findings while also recording posts in a spreadsheet. We divided the journal into the following sections: the overall issue that the meme is addressing, the format that is being used in the meme, how the audience responds to it, our personal reflections, and a summary about the page and its content. Stirling (2016) emphasizes the importance of putting screenshots in your journals, which we incorporated to provide examples in our writing.

In addition, we also recorded posts in a spreadsheet and manually coded popular coronavirus memes on the pages using an inductive codebook. Coupled with this, we created a dashboard using Crowdtangle which allowed us to monitor and collect memes beyond the ones gathered and coded.

Conclusion

We have been using this method for the past month and plan on continuing to do so until at least the end of August. So far, this method has been an effective way to understand the conversation, dialogue and backstory to the memes being posted by the groups. We have come across memes where commenters argue about the posted meme’s message, and have also contextualized how news posts and other content plays into the memetic conversation on these pages. 

By keeping these journals over time, we have watched the memespace change, caught similarities between typically disparate meme groups and tracked conversation change during the pandemic as other large events (like Black Lives Matter protests) occurred. While we are still refining our methodology, the mix of qualitative journaling with quantitative data collection helps construct an effective view of partisan meme space during COVID-19.

The funding for this project comes from the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship (CSDC).

References

• Berg, M., & Düvel, C. (2012). Qualitative media diaries: An instrument for doing research from a mobile media ethnographic perspective. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 3(1), 71–89. https://doi.org/10.1386/iscc.3.1.71_1
• Elmer, G., Langlois, G., & McKelvey, F. (2012). The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics. Peter Lang.
• Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. SAGE Publications.
• McKelvey, F., Côté, M., & Raynauld, V. (2018). Scandals and Screenshots: Social Media Elites in Canadian Politics. In A. Marland, T. Giasson, & A. Lawlor (Eds.), Political Elites in Canada: Power and Influence in Instantaneous Times (pp. 204–222). UBC Press.
• Milner, R. M., & Phillips, W. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity.
• Moody-Ramirez, M., & Church, A. B. (2019). Analysis of Facebook Meme Groups Used During the 2016 US Presidential Election. Social Media + Society, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118808799
• Nielsen, R. K. (2020, May 22). Communications research has a lot to offer during the coronavirus crisis. But are we offering it? Rasmuskleisnielsen.net. https://rasmuskleisnielsen.net/2020/05/22/communications-research-has-a-lot-to-offer-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-but-are-we-offering-it/
• Pink, S. (2007). Doing Visual Ethnography. SAGE Publications, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857025029
• Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in digital culture. The MIT Press.
• Stirling, E. (2016). ‘I’m Always on Facebook!’: Exploring Facebook as a Mainstream Research Tool and Ethnographic Site. In H. Snee, C. Hine, Y. Morey, S. Roberts, & H. Watson (Eds.), Digital Methods for Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Research Innovation (pp. 51–66). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453662_4