Memes in Canadian Politics

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

Call for submissions, deadline 3 January 2020.

We are accepting submissions for the Great Canadian Encyclopedia of Political Meme. Entries focus on a single meme and its relevance to the 43rd Canadian Election. The entry is a chance to explain if and how memes mattered in #elxn43. You might select an example because you think it:

• exemplifies the type of content shared in your sample;
• influenced a party’s brand during the election;
• framed an issue during the election;
• was popular or shared a lot;
• transgressed community values or norms;
• connected different communities in important ways (from fringe to mainstream); or, 
• iterated on the meme or memetic style in a unique or distinct way.

Submissions should include:

• A copy of the meme and related memes or party images;
• A description of the image and its relation to a meme found in Know Your Meme or party brand (250 words); 
• The context / place you encountered it in or where you want to situate the meme (250 words); and,
• An analysis of the visual argument of the meme (1000 words):
  • Analysis can focus on images as arguments, agenda setting function, policy dramatization, emotional appeal, image building for candidate, creating identification, connection to societal symbols, audience transportation, and ambiguity; or, in relation to brands, mediatization, misinformation/disinformation or memetic theory.

Please use the template below as a reference. Submissions can be emailed to fenwick-dot-mckelvey-at-concordia-dot-ca

Access to meme archive available upon request. Please contact fenwick-dot-mckelvey-at-concordia-dot-ca for access and for more details.

You Can’t Defeat Me

About and origin

Vote Liberal! No one else can defeat the Conservative enemy. Stills from Thor: Ragnarök is one way to advocate strategic voting. Only the Liberals aren’t the heroes, they are something much worse. The meme refers to the film’s end when Thor realizes he cannot defeat his evil sister Hela, the film’s villain. Only by bringing about ragnarök — the destruction of Thor’s home Asgard — can Hela be defeated. Hela is labelled as the Conservative Party and the hero, the wounded Thor, is labelled as the NDP. The all-powerful demon Sutur, bringer of ragnarök, is labelled as the Liberal party. The meme casts the voters’ choice in no less dire terms: they have to choose the lesser of two evils. The NDP, heroic as it may be, is less powerful than the Conservatives. Only the Liberals, the meme implies, have the power to defeat the Conservative threat.

You Can’t Defeat Me is a three-panel, object label meme that uses the still from the 2017 Marvel superhero film Thor: Ragnarök. According to Know Your Meme, the meme first appeared on the Marvel Shieldposting Facebook group on 2 July 2018. By 19 July 2018, templates could be found for the meme and being appraised on /r/MemeEconomy. 

The three-panels are often used as a joke to compare sports teams, movies and video games. One of the first examples, according to Know Your Meme, was a play on team rankings during the 2018 Men’s Soccer World Cup. As the meme popularized, new interpretations played with the format with 9 8 7 being a play on the schoolyard joke. 

Context and circulation

The meme appeared in our sample on The National Meme Board. The Facebook page had been active throughout the campaign, posting at least 132 memes largely promoting the Liberal brand out of TK posts from September 30 to October 28. The group was one of the most active during the election, creating the most pro-Liberal memes found on Facebook.

The National Meme Board posted the meme on 10 October, three days after the only all-leaders English debate. The consensus was no one had won the debate and the results showed in the polls. According to the CBC poll tracker, the Liberal and Conservative campaigns had plateaued around 33% of the vote, and coverage predicted a minority government. Strategic voting and vote splitting would become an important theme in memespace. 

By then, posters had also distanced themselves from Trudeau following the Blackface scandal. Meme makers crafted messages to support the party and the platform, but not the leader. So this meme was one of many memes in the group mocking the Conservatives, warning about vote splitting with the NDP, and advocating to vote Liberal, without campaigning for Trudeau.

The meme added the caption, “Say no vote splits, for reference 2018 Ontario election and 2011 election,” which seems to be another reference to the victory of Ontario Premier Doug Ford and the 2011 win of the Conservative Party of Canada. The post’s references are doubtful though as Tom Cardoso writes about the Ontario Election. Vote splitting “may have cost the NDP a few ridings, but the PCs’ majority can’t be chalked up to the left-leaning parties purely splitting the vote.” 

The post led to an active discussion with 372 Likes, 215 Comments and 96 Shares. The most liked comment, 133, largely agreed with the vilification of the Scheer campaign, “I’m not a big fan of the Liberals, but even a lollipop coated in dog hair is a better candidate than Scheer.” However, comments did not all follow the meme pro-Liberal message as another popular post asked, “Perhaps the Liberals should question why their platform is so unappealing that the only way they can defeat goofballs like the cons is by scaring everyone else to vote for them.” The comments then became a moment to debate the emotional frame of scariness to motivate voting.

NMBC was not the first to use the meme in Canadian politics. The meme appears to have been used in some political memes, in the case above to mock in-fighting between leftist posters.  

Analysis (1000 words)

Marvel’s take on the twilight of the gods was a hell of a way to add some drama to the campaign. The dramatic function of the meme captures both the tone of the Liberal’s negative campaign buts adds new drama through the film references. As political communication scholar Daniel Schill notes, “the nature of visual symbols allows candidates and other political participants to give life to a policy and demonstrate its importance through pictures.” What better way to dramatize a potential lose than comparing your opponent’s victory to ragnarök itself.

Before even setting up its argument to vote strategically, the meme sets up the dire stakes of the election. The climate emergency looms over the election like Hela at the bridge to Asgard. The meme might be considered “political imagery related to the environment,” as Patrick McCurdy describes, that does not feature the environment. Much like energy industry ads that  “advertis[e] the oil sands without the oil sands,” the climate emergency is offscreen. Instead, the focus is on the dire threat of a Conservative win.

While memes could be direct, the Liberals didn’t necessary state that voting Conservative could bring about the end times, they came close enough. 

Justin Trudeau’s campaign tweeted, “Vote like your planet depends on it” with a short message above the image reminding followers in Internet-speak, “Because it does.” As the only party that failed to present a climate action strategy, the meme captures the anxieties around a possible Conservative win. A Conservative victory would be bad for the planet like Hela would be bad for Asgard. 

Overcast skies and Hela’s black crown dramatize a Conservative win very differently than other memes about the climate and a Conservative victory. Another meme used a scene from Charlie Scheen’s hit show Two and a Half Men to dramatize the election. The joke is the Conservative’s missing climate action plan, but the tone is lighter: The crisis is presented as less terrible, just a kid waiting in the rain to be picked up.

In the Thor meme, the end is near. The meme’s dark humour dramatizes the election in much the same way Thor’s director Taika Waititi used the Marvel franchise to inject the affective legacies of colonialism into a superhero franchise. While the latest Thor movie had a sense of humour as well, it offers the film’s more mature commentaries on Asgard as an empire built on a bloody history of colonialism. 

What is striking then is the meme’s ability to be funny, dark and urgent at once, allowing the meme’s enthymematic argument to keep this mix of emotions in play as it lays out an argument to vote strategically. It is an emotional argument using the drama of the movie as a metonym for the unstated consequences of a Conservative victory. More so, the drama carries the argument away from oppositional readings where Sutur might be a worse evil that Hela.

The meme is the latest re-mediation of the perennial strategic voting issue. Strategic voting has been a mainstay of internet politics in Canada. During the 2008 federal election, groups emerged online to help people coordinate strategic voting, or vote swapping. A voter in a swing riding could plead to vote Liberal in exchange for another voter to cast a ballot for the Green party. With the per-vote subsidy still in effect, these strategic votes could help a party’s bottom line if not its seat count. Leadnow, a good example of a digital-first advocacy group, professionalized vote swapping in later elections by identifying swing ridings and working at a local level to elect anyone but Conservatives.

Strategic voting has been made meme before, or at least close to it. In contrast to Leadnow’s professionalism, the comedic political third-party Shit Harper Did drew upon memes and the success of satirical websites like the Onion to campaign against Harper. Started as a joke, the website at first just provided random facts about Harper’s poor record. As it developed,  the group funnelled visitors hoping to laugh at Harper’s record for strategic voting in the 2011 and 2015 elections, a part of the youthful movement that brought Trudeau to power in the first place. 

This meme then demonstrates a bit of a contradiction in political communication. The style has to be innovative because the issue is so enduring. Strategic voting has come in many forms and memes are neither the first nor the last time the threat of vote splitting will help Liberal governments. Thor and the Battle of Asgard offers nothing more than a new way for the most recent Liberal campaign to scare progressive voters. 

Voters seemed to have listened to the calls to vote Liberal in the face of the Conservative threat,at least during these early days of analysis. “Thirty-five per cent of respondents to the Leger poll said their decision about which party to support took into account the chance that their vote might prevent another party’s candidate from being victorious,” the CBC reported after the election. The comfortable Liberal minority might have been a lot closer were it not for the work of partisans raising the implied threat of a Conservative victory.

The only instance of the “you can’t defeat me” meme found in the election, the meme shows how visual arguments can hold together, even dramatic, an ultimately grim sentiment about elections in Canada. The stakes are not policy, but emotional, good and bad. Heroes do not succeed. Ideals and determination cannot win elections. Only a horrible red monster can. A terrible choice that voters must make and one that partisans can be committed to even if they admit to being one of the bad guys.