Memes in Canadian Politics

With horse race coverage of the election fixed on a dead heat between the Liberal and Conservative parties, partisan Facebook memes now try to persuade voters on the best way to cast their ballot when it seems no party will win a majority. Though not officially affiliated with political parties and therefore independent, these groups largely align with the positions of the respective party they tend to support. Liberal memes remind voters that voting Liberal is the only way to defeat Conservatives. Similarly, Conservative Facebook pages warn voters about the risk of a coalition if the Conservative’s do not win a strong mandate, whereas NDP memes call on voters to vote with their beliefs, and use the looming outcome as a reminder for electoral reform.

Strategic Voting as Key Liberal Message

Voting NDP will not defeat the conservatives according to Liberal-leaning memes. These memes mock progressive voters for being naive about their vote and out of touch with the NDP’s election prospects. Dippers are presented as ‘confused’, as seen in Figure 1 that uses an old Filthy Frank image. Instead, the meme suggests voters need to be pragmatic and vote Liberal. 

Another Liberal meme uses a scene from the film Thor: Ragnarök to make a rather complex call to vote Liberal strategically. Figure 2 is a known meme referring 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. Here, the evil Hela is labelled as the Conservative Party. She mocks a weary Thor, labelled as the NDP. The Liberals are labelled as the all-powerful demon Sutur, bringer of ragnarök. In the film, Suter defeats Hela while destroying Asgard. 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 Liberals. Only the Liberals, the meme implies, have the power to defeat the Conservative threat.

The meme, importantly, does not include the final shots of Asgard on fire nor comments on the film’s deeper anti-colonial messages. We have not encountered any reaction memes to date that play on these missed references.

NDP: Don’t Fall for Calls to Vote Strategically

NDP-leaning memes frame strategic voting as a trick played by Liberals on progressives. Using many popular memes, they try to remind voters that voting Liberal does not ensure a progressive government. Instead, as seen in a play on the Flex Tape meme used in Figure 3, the Liberal record is the real problem. Voting strategically is just a ‘patch’. Figure 4 makes a similar point where Lucy’s age-old trick on Charlie Brown illustrates the plight of strategic, progressive voters.

NDP memes also emphasize that the party’s values are important enough to take a risk. A play on the popular Woman Yelling at a Cat meme (Figure 5) is a good example of how NDP voters push back at Liberal calls for strategic voting.

Anti-coalition Conservative Memes

Conservative memes trade in the old stock worry about a coalition, much like their leader Andrew Scheer. Posts from third-party advertisers Canada Proud and Proud to be Canadian, seen in Figures 6 and 7, have circulated in anti-Trudeau groups. According to these memes, voters should be worried about a Liberal-NDP coalition, much like Scheer’s fabricated comments about tax hikes, and so Figure 4 asks voters to “play it safe” and elect conservatives. 

More organic memes from groups with supposedly user-generated content also worry that a vote for the NDP is a trojan horse for the Liberal party, as seen in Figure 8.

From Memes to Mobilization

As the election campaign draws to a finish, meme groups have also begun to encourage supporters to get out the vote. These memes, seen in Figures 9 and 10, illustrate how online communication is part of election day mobilization. Sharing a meme is the first step in today’s online ladder of engagement. 

Highlights

Internet users were quick to ‘meme’ last week’s scandalous images of Trudeau dressed in ‘brownface’ and ‘blackface’. Memes differed by the political allegiance of those who shared them, illustrating how party supporters make memes to help their party’s public image.

Anti-Trudeau Conservative memes highlighted Trudeau’s hypocrisy, questioned his character, and characterized Liberal party accusations of racism as disingenuous.

Memes from the left focused on the broader social issue, choosing to address racism in Canada and the skin tone of its NDP leader Jagmeet Singh rather than targeting the specific images of Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau.

Pro-Trudeau Liberal memes sought to minimize the incident, focusing more on characterized Conservative leader Andrew Scheer as the real threat.

Analysis

The Algorithmic Media Observatory is tracking October 2019’s Federal Election in Canada specifically through memes, or images inspired by Internet culture.

Ugly and home-made but also incisive commentary and artful craft, memes offer a unique vantage point from which to observe public opinion and, crucially, how party supporters and engaged citizens use the internet to identify with parties, leaders and movements.

To date, we have identified roughly 30 Facebook groups posting memes about Canadian politics, some professional other seemingly user-generated. We have found that:

1. There is a strong presence of anti-Trudeau and Conservative meme groups on Facebook. These groups are among the largest, most active in the sample.
2. There are smaller, but equally active, meme communities for Liberal and NDP supporters that share memes daily. 
3. Meme groups care about different issues (climate change in the left and center vs. political corruption on the right and center), but the Trudeau scandal mobilized all sides.

These three features are clearly exhibited in the top 20 Facebook groups by follower count.

Most groups post negative content about Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau. Anti-Trudeau groups have a much larger follower count (approximately 900,000 anti-Trudeau followers), although we hesitate to give much weight to follower counts given how easily these numbers can be artificially manipulated. In the past few days, some Liberal groups have remained committed to the party, but tried to distance themselves from Trudeau.

Conservative and Anti-Trudeau Memes

Among more conservative circles, memes emphasized the hypocrisy of Justin Trudeau and his followers. Memes, such as Figure 1, use the scandal as a chance to discredit Liberals as hypocrites. In doing so, these memes re-frame a discussion about race in politics as an opportunity to discredit any accusations of racism in the campaign, especially from Liberal candidates and supporters. These memes suggest some blowback to the Liberal’s strategy of opposition research and negative campaigning  against the Conservative party. Anti-Trudeau memes, such as Figure 2, also connect Trudeau’s poor judgement in 2001 with tropes and opinions of his other moral shortcomings (like being too ‘gropy’ with women).

Left and NDP Memes

Unlike conservative groups, NDP supporters heavily mocked the prime minister’s actions as racist, as seen in Figures 3 and 4.

Emblematic of the NDP’s focus on social issues, the memes showed direct concern of racism, pushing themselves onto a socially moral high ground with their own leader, Jagmeet Singh. Memes questioned Liberal sentiment, presenting the defense of Trudeau as humorous and ridiculous as well as the calling out the ignorance of Liberals regarding structural racism in Canada.

Liberal, pro-Trudeau Memes

Pro-Trudeau, Liberal memes have attempted to do damage control by attacking conservatives. Their memes ignore the black/brownface actions and focus instead on discussing racism within Canadian politics in general. These memes identify the Conservative candidates, party and ideology as a worse version of Trudeau’s actions, implying that Trudeau is not being “as” racist as the Conservative party, as seen in Figure 5

We have also observed Liberal groups sharing a photo of Stephen Harper during an honorary Indigenous ceremony, removing the context of the image to fabricate their message. This strategy backfired, as Robert Jago explains:

Here’s a public service berating: Liberals, when you send this picture around and say – look Harper did it too – he’s not at a Halloween party, he’s at a Native ceremony. That paint, the headdress, you’re laughing at a Native ceremony. YOU are the racist asshole in this scenario – Robert Jago

Other Liberal memes also downplay the damage this will have to the Liberal party’s election fortunes, questioning whether the past transgression of Trudeau would lead to “minorities” to vote for Scheer as seen in Figure 6.

Through memes, we have a new vantage point to understand partisanship in Canada as well as the ways message control may operate on so-called ‘user-generated’ content.

As the black/brownface controversy and election generally progress, memes will continue to further dialogue and opinion on candidates and the election. Our analysis of this event offers an important snapshot of how different segments of Canada’s political spectrum interpret racist acts and highlights how politics and humour intersect.

While Maclean’s magazine aspires to entertain its readers, it certainly didn’t expect its 7 November 2018 cover to be quite so entertaining. The cover labelled a photo of five Conservative leaders as “The Resistance” – a reference to anti-Trump movement south of the border. The comparison was too funny for Liberals and other partisans who could not rationalize comparing activism in the United States to the efforts of five politicians in Canada against the carbon tax. On social media, users mocked the cover by photoshopping it or recaptioning it as if to double-down on their perception that the cover was absurd. In effect, Maclean’s cover was made meme, becoming a moment of political frenzy, reminding citizens about politics and re-framing discussion of the carbon tax, for a moment. 

Memes are referential images shared, modified and, in the case above, politicized online. The Maclean’s Resistance cover suggests that memes are a way of expressing and engaging in partisan politics, in this case allowing Liberals and anti-Conservative voters to constitute what Zizi Papacharissi calls “networked structures of feeling”. 

Memes may be political, but we’re not sure how, at least in Canada. There was a rush after the election to overstate meme’s effect in Donald Trump’s election. But as Dr. Whitney Phillips, Dr. Gabriella Coleman and Dr. Jessica Beyer emphasize the popularity of memes about Trump and Trump himself “cannot and should not be tethered to online communities of the past. It was, instead, symptomatic of much deeper, much more immediate cultural malaise.” 

Our project then looks to memes as a reflection of this deeper story of Canadian culture, looking to the popularity of memes to understand how partisans and publics relate to politicians and parties. There is little research about memes in Canadian politics (the notable exception being the work of Mireille Lalancette). We believe that through memes partisans and political spectators form and sustain feelings and attachments to parties and leaders.

Memes also defy current approaches to political communication and election studies. We are just beginning to understand how the short, visual, often humorous messages alter the popularity of political issues and the nature of partisanship.

Our project provides a first major study of memes in elections in Canada, experimenting with large-scale computational methods in cooperation with established methods of political communication to understand the encoding of politics and partisanship through memes.

Over the next few weeks into the election, our project will be covering memes and visual internet culture in the Canadian election. Reports will:

1. Help describe the most popular and most frequently shared memes during the Canadian federal election and analyze their political significance;
2. Discuss how partisans differ in how they produce, modify and share memes in Canada; and,
3. Map how memes circulate online.

We will need your help too.

At the end of the project, we will collect our analysis to create The Great Canadian Encyclopedia of Political Memes. Modeled after Know Your Meme, we will collect significant memes and tell their stories. After the election, we will be sharing how you too can participate in writing an entry.

The project is led by Dr. McKelvey (Concordia University) and Dr. Blackburn (Binghamton University) working with a team of students in the Communication Studies at Concordia University.