The Meme-ification of Political Issues. Moving beyond the pros and cons of AI-enabled virality for social justice

3 min read 

On November 15th, the New Zealand parliament was brought to a standstill after Māori MPs staged a haka in protest of a new bill that would threaten Māori rights in the country. The protest was led by Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, who dramatically ripped up the proposed bill before leading other members of the parliament in a combative haka. News travelled fast, and the clip was soon seen around the world. Mere hours later, it had already been turned into a meme. The memes used Maipi-Clarke’s tearing of the bill as a reaction clip transposed into contexts such as reacting to exam results or electricity bills, disconnected from the political gravity of the situation. Many users stood up to this memeification, asking in the comments to respect the cultural heritage of the haka and to cease using this clip as a meme.

This situation occurs time and time again: a piece of news goes viral, bringing more attention to a political issue, but as it continues to circulate and spread, it becomes removed from its original context and eventually becomes depoliticised. For example, in South Korea, the attempted imposition of martial law by President Yoon Suk Yeol was quickly memed. Reacting to, talking about or processing global events through memes has become commonplace. On the other hand, digitally native memes, ones created online, can also become politicised during their circulation and appropriated for political gain. Such was the case with Pepe, the infamous cartoon frog that became the symbol of the Alt-right. Now, urgent anxieties and fears over contamination and the spread of misinformation through AI-generated images are weakening our ability to trust. Many claim AI-enabled memes are undermining our democracy. However, memes can also act as a form of local political empowerment in a globalised world, especially for marginalised communities in the Global South. In today’s internet, how do we optimize the logic of virality and memeification and simultaneously do justice to the political issues at hand?

Countering AI meme warfare: the language of universality as solidarity

The use of AI-generated content in political debate represents new rules of engagement. Now, memes are not only used on both sides of the political spectrum but also by different agents. Meme warfare became a key battleground in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Ukraine’s official Twitter account posting memes. Recently, the issue has taken on a new dimension, as generative AI tools are giving internet users the tools to create digital propaganda indiscriminately and at a massive scale. AI-enabled memes are generated with the ethos of memes, namely as viral and easily spreadable objects, but can be with malicious intent. What used to gain popularity over time can now be created and disseminated in minutes, and intention has become even harder to discern. Malicious use of AI to generate digital propaganda through deepfake and manipulated content takes advantage of the nearly indistinguishable gap between real and fake content online now, and of the channels of virality routinely used by memes. Such anxiety around memes also reveals fears about contamination and manipulation, which are culturally shaped. Cultures in the Global South might receive such ideas about technological virality differently, such as in the case of the Congo that uses such a medium to ‘galvanise people to laugh at those in power, but also those who are subjected to it.’

Amidst fears about memetic warfare and the spread of hate through memes, their capacity to educate and bring critical attention to an issue should not be underestimated. During Covid-19, memes in Singapore and Malaysia were spread by “meme factories” to highlight important information and bring awareness to specific issues or were used by doctors to address misinformation about the disease. The way that memes can be used for empowerment depends on their vehicle for success: their virality. However, local and contextual uses of memes are important for community building establishing trust and political activism, such as in the case of Indigenous communities. For communities who have seen their history re-written through colonisation, the sharing of memes in an online space can be an alternative form of passing down historical and cultural knowledge and an opportunity to engage collectively with decolonial ideas. Often, new contexts also present new opportunities to interpret memes. For example, the democratic protests in Hong Kong provide an interesting case of meme internationalisation changing cultural meaning, namely the renegotiation of Pepe into a symbol of love and acceptance.

The challenges around using memes as a form of political expression are many in an age of profound distrust and AI-generated memetic warfare. To recalibrate our trust in images and the content we see, we need to situate these memes in their local contexts and their storytelling intent.  Using memes for progressive politics, community building and social well-being in global digital cultures can still be a tool for good, if we also account for culture and context as an essential part of the equation.