Propaganda of the digital age: How memes are weaponized to spread disinformation

If you’ve spent any time online, you’ve likely encountered a meme — any combination of image, video or text that is remixed, replicated and shared to convey a message.

Most are funny. Some are cute and harmless.

They can be simple and straightforward, such as a rallying cry to join a cause or sway opinions.

Others are edgy and complex — an inside joke among members of a certain community.

Memes are easy to create and even easier to share. They are the pamphlets and political cartoons of the digital age. They can seem trivial, but memes are arguably the most effective way to reach a massive audience with minimal resources.

Which means they are also an ideal vehicle to spread misinformation, disinformation, hatred and calls for violence.

The mayhem on Jan. 6, 2021, featured a mob storming the U.S. Capitol, attacking police and spilling blood with fists, flag poles and stolen riot shields.

Amid the haze of smoke grenades and bear spray were recognizable symbols that have been adopted by far-right extremists: a noose and makeshift gallows; the Confederate stars and bars; and the coiled snake of the Gadsden flag with its "Don’t Tread On Me" warning.

But for those unfamiliar with certain Internet subcultures, less obvious but equally potent icons at the riot may have caused confusion. They included a green, anthropomorphic cartoon frog named Pepe on masks and clothing, and green flags with a black symbol spelling the word “Kek” waving above the crowd.

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.

USA TODAY reviewed thousands of Internet memes ranging from serious issues like the Jan. 6 hearings and the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, to absurd conspiracy theories concerning 5G and Jewish space lasers. The examination found that a seemingly endless supply of memes designed to sow discord and blur the lines between fact and fiction flourish unabated online despite pledges by social media companies to stamp out or at least flag such content with warnings. Experts USA TODAY interviewed said these online images, videos, hashtags and slogans have become a dominant form of communication in the digital age and have been weaponized to spread disinformation and polarize the population.

“Most people dismiss memes as just Internet humor or a passing laugh, but they have been used for decades in propaganda and as psychological warfare,” said Joan Donovan, research director of the Harvard Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and co-author of the 2022 book “Meme Wars.” 

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. As a result, organizations that monitor hate groups and extremism — like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti Defamation League  — employ experts and dedicate other resources to studying and reporting on memes.

“The importance of these things cannot be understated,” said Megan Squire, SPLC’s deputy director for Data Analytics & Open Source Intelligence. “The fact that a lot of this radicalization and extremist rhetoric and all this is happening online, that's evidence for why my position exists now.”

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.

This screenshot — featured in the search results of "#SaveOurChildrenNow" on Facebook — suggests that drag queens seek audiences of children, implying unsubstantiated pedophilic motives or tendencies among one group in the LGBTQ+ community.
This screenshot — featured in the search results of "#SaveOurChildrenNow" on Facebook — suggests that drag queens seek audiences of children, implying unsubstantiated pedophilic motives or tendencies among one group in the LGBTQ+ community.
A meme featured in the search results of "#SaveOurChildrenNow" on Facebook is linked to a QAnon conspiracy theory that Donald Trump battled a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers.
A meme featured in the search results of "#SaveOurChildrenNow" on Facebook is linked to a QAnon conspiracy theory that Donald Trump battled a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers.

Spokespeople from Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Twitter and YouTube (which is owned by Google) declined to answer specific questions about how the companies moderate memetic content. Each shared general strategies on how they fight misleading and potentially harmful content, such as labeling posts that contain deceptive or false information and reducing the distribution of misleading posts. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram partner with fact-checking organizations that are supposed to help label misleading posts and remove those that could cause harm or incite violence, among other ongoing efforts.

Facebook also takes down what it calls “covert networks” that seek to spread misinformation and sow discord. Last year alone, the company said, it removed 52 networks “that engaged in coordinated efforts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic goal, while relying centrally on fake accounts to mislead people about who’s behind them.”

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. 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.

In one meme posted on Twitter on the day the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago residence, President Joe Biden wields a small gun with text reading, "BREAKING: Photo of lead FBI agent in raid on Mar-A-Lago leaked." The false statement suggests Biden was involved in the raid.
In one meme posted on Twitter on the day the FBI executed a search warrant at Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago residence, President Joe Biden wields a small gun with text reading, "BREAKING: Photo of lead FBI agent in raid on Mar-A-Lago leaked." The false statement suggests Biden was involved in the raid.
This meme — posted on Twitter after FBI agents searched Mar-A-Lago — shows Donald Trump holding an automatic firearm in the "fashwave" aesthetic, a stylistic trend utilized by far-right extremists. The caption reads, "IT'S REVENGE TIME. TRUMP 2024. WE WILL SETTLE FOR NOTHING LESS!"
This meme — posted on Twitter after FBI agents searched Mar-A-Lago — shows Donald Trump holding an automatic firearm in the "fashwave" aesthetic, a stylistic trend utilized by far-right extremists. The caption reads, "IT'S REVENGE TIME. TRUMP 2024. WE WILL SETTLE FOR NOTHING LESS!"
A quote from former U.S. president Harry S. Truman warning against government "silencing the voice of opposition" is paired with a comment comparing the FBI to the Gestapo in a post shared after the FBI searched Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.
A quote from former U.S. president Harry S. Truman warning against government "silencing the voice of opposition" is paired with a comment comparing the FBI to the Gestapo in a post shared after the FBI searched Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.

An analysis by the non-profit and non-partisan organization Advance Democracy, also conducted at USA Today's request, 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.

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."

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. One popular meme format threatened violence against Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

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.

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, author of the 2020 book “How to Lose the Information War.”

Jankowicz herself fell victim to a disinformation campaign. She was poised to become the first director of the Disinformation Governance Board, a federal advisory group President Joe Biden’s administration announced in April to study best practices in combating disinformation.

But right-wing opponents quickly dubbed Jankowicz’s board the “Ministry of Truth,” a nod to the fictional government department in George Orwell's dystopian novel “1984." Memes riffing off the reference spread on social media platforms. Meme accounts on Instagram and Twitter borrowed the name, with the Twitter troll account @USMiniTru garnering over 300,000 followers by September.

The Biden administration disbanded its Disinformation Governance Board in August, sinking the initiative before it officially launched.

“We became a meme. I became a meme. My face became a meme,” Jankowicz said. “The government was just incredibly ill equipped at responding in a rapid enough manner to this thing that went hugely viral.”

‘Our culture is made of memes’

Memes are more than just images and videos, and they’ve been around far longer than the Internet. Such messages existed offline in the form of political pamphlets, government propaganda, advertising jingles and other methods of traditional communication. The iconic Uncle Sam “I Want You for U.S. Army” poster is a meme of sorts. So is the catchy Oscar-Meyer bologna tune. Both have been remixed and shared ad nauseam for decades.

The iconic Uncle Sam “I Want You for U.S. Army” poster is considered an example of a meme.
The iconic Uncle Sam “I Want You for U.S. Army” poster is considered an example of a meme.

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.

When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene,” he used it to describe any form of culture or content that thrives on replication, alteration, sharing and mutation to survive from person-to-person and generation-to-generation. He compared it to a gene.

Internet memes are just one kind of meme. According to Susan Blackmore, author of the 1999 book “The Meme Machine” and leading memetic scholar, they’re a perfect example.

“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.”

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. They now appear almost everywhere — from social media feeds and political campaigns to official White House communications and online news stories.

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.

A Facebook ad posted by Russian operatives in October 2016 compared Hillary Clinton to Satan. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee archived and published the ad as part of a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A Facebook ad posted by Russian operatives in October 2016 compared Hillary Clinton to Satan. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee archived and published the ad as part of a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A May 2016 ad posted to Facebook by Russian operatives reference the baseless conspiracy theory that former president Barak Obama is a muslim "traitor" and a figurehead acting in the interests of Arab leaders against the U.S. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee archived and published the ad in a report on Russian election interference.
A May 2016 ad posted to Facebook by Russian operatives reference the baseless conspiracy theory that former president Barak Obama is a muslim "traitor" and a figurehead acting in the interests of Arab leaders against the U.S. The U.S. House Intelligence Committee archived and published the ad in a report on Russian election interference.

“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.”

Trump’s election coincided with a rise of online propaganda from hate groups espousing male-dominated, white nationalist ideals in the form of humorous and often innocuous-looking memes. It also saw the transformation of Kekistan from an online farce to a far-right icon.

The Kekistan flag — which made appearances at the Jan. 6 riot, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and other far-right events — began as an inside joke among online gamers who adopted it as an ironic emblem of a mythical motherland. In this convoluted bit of lore, Kekistan's denizens worship the frog-headed Egyptian deity “Kek,” represented by a once-harmless Pepe the Frog cartoon that was also adopted as a symbol by the far-right. Kekistan later evolved into its own symbol of the white nationalist movement. (It's not meant to be easily understood by outsiders — it embodies the meme war effort to spread discord and chaos).

These images were extracted from 4chan message board posts using a computer vision model that learned to recognize Kekistani flags.
These images were extracted from 4chan message board posts using a computer vision model that learned to recognize Kekistani flags.

“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.”

Gunmen motivated by hateful content

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.

Wearing body armor and a military helmet, and armed with a modified Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, the man shot four people in the parking lot before entering the store and shooting eight more. Eleven of the victims were Black. Ten of them died.

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.

Police block the entrance to the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. where a gunman killed ten people in May 2022. The gunman credited memes for influencing his hate-filled ideologies.
Police block the entrance to the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y. where a gunman killed ten people in May 2022. The gunman credited memes for influencing his hate-filled ideologies.

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.

Both documents 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.”

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.

This strategy of weaponizing memes as tools for swaying public opinion and indoctrination has been playing out online for years.

A meme from the Daily Stormer depicts Adolf Hitler with text above reading, "Me and the boys coming up with fresh memes," illustrating the integral use of memes by white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
A meme from the Daily Stormer depicts Adolf Hitler with text above reading, "Me and the boys coming up with fresh memes," illustrating the integral use of memes by white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
This antisemitic meme, from the private Discord server of the Buffalo gunman, references a white nationalist conspiracy theory that white people are being 'replaced' by people of color and that Jewish people are orchestrating that change. The unfounded theory has motivated multiple mass shooters in recent years.
This antisemitic meme, from the private Discord server of the Buffalo gunman, references a white nationalist conspiracy theory that white people are being 'replaced' by people of color and that Jewish people are orchestrating that change. The unfounded theory has motivated multiple mass shooters in recent years.

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.

The tactics appear to have worked, at least in the case of the Buffalo gunman. In the document he posted online, he specifically credited The Daily Stormer and its memes for having changed his views and political positions.

Casting such online hate speech as irony or a joke "has proven to be incredibly dangerous," according to Ryan Milner, associate professor of communications at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and co-author of the 2021 book “You Are Here.”

“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.

The power of memes in mobilizing participants at the Capitol riot is also cited in court records. Joshua Pruitt, 41, was sentenced in August by a federal judge to 55 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release after pleading guilty in June to obstructing an official proceeding. Pruitt participated in the riot in concert with members of the Proud Boys, a far-right neo-fascist organization.

Court documents detailed Pruitt’s inclusion in a group chat which was used to organize and coordinate logistics for Proud Boys involved in the riot. In addition to discussions of attire, lodging, hate speech and politics, “The chat also included explicitly anti-Semitic and racist memes,” according to the court documents. These included images of Hitler and white power slogans.

Memes are ‘meant to trick you’

A well-crafted meme works like a virus — it tricks participants into passing it on. By tapping into human nature, memes can spread through an online community and infect members, carrying its message through each “like” and “share.”

“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.”

This common meme format — built using two images from a music video by the artist Drake — incorporates humor and irony to illustrate the reality of rising infection cases over the course of the pandemic, despite attempts at "flattening the curve" of COVID rates.
This common meme format — built using two images from a music video by the artist Drake — incorporates humor and irony to illustrate the reality of rising infection cases over the course of the pandemic, despite attempts at "flattening the curve" of COVID rates.
This meme uses two still images from the television show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to critique government efforts to combat the COVID-19 virus.
This meme uses two still images from the television show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood to critique government efforts to combat the COVID-19 virus.

During the height of the pandemic, COVID-disinformation memes proliferated on social media. These images, videos and hashtags helped convince legions of Americans to turn against institutions, science and common sense.

The memes promoted the use of discredited treatments like the horse deworming drug ivermectin, prescriptions of which surged throughout 2020 despite no proof of its effectiveness in treating COVID-19 symptoms. And related memes facilitated a movement of enraged parents showing up at school board meetings to rail against mandatory masking. Even if they didn’t take any overt action, people who shared these memes helped grow and normalize these movements.

“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."

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.  “I reject both the substance and the tone of the remarks, and resent their presentation as a direct quotation," Campbell wrote in response to the meme.
An anti-vaccination COVID meme that is available on Twitter and Reddit.
An anti-vaccination COVID meme that is available on Twitter and Reddit.

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.

“You've always had rumors, you've always had suspect thoughts about the truth that definitely was part of our mass media ecosystem in the 20th century,” Milner said. “Then there's the Internet, and now the speed is up, the reach is up, we're even more distributed. And you have all of that working together now.”

Everyone has a responsibility to educate themselves and become more media literate, said Aniano of the Anti Defamation League. But equally important is for social media companies to more actively crack down on the spread of disinformation while being more transparent about their engagement data.

“Memes are historically under-studied and not taken as seriously as they should be,” Aniano said. “We need that information to understand what this content is doing to the world, and for them to take content moderation seriously.”

Taraneh Azar is a 2022 summer intern reporter on USA TODAY's national investigative team, specializing in online communities and viral content. Azar can be reached on Twitter at @TaranehTAzar or at taranehazar@yahoo.com.

USA TODAY senior data reporter Aleszu Bajak contributed to this report.

For more on this topic, listen to our Twitter Spaces conversation. Taraneh Azar and experts Nina Jankowicz and Joan Donovan discussed memes, disinformation and what you can do when sharing information online.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Memes spread disinformation on Mar-a-Lago raid, Jan. 6 hearings, COVID