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I can has the presidency?

By Didi Beck, Almond Li, Alex Salvi, Nehaly Shah and Katcy Stephan

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Make memes, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

Will Dowd, a recent college graduate, never intended to influence an election when he created the Facebook group “Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash.” But then the site amassed almost 500,000 members in just 10 months.

Internet memes like “Forever Alone” and “Y U NO” are meant to be funny. Dowd, however, believes that dank memes also have the potential to inform and engage the public in politics. “I had a lot of people [saying] to me, ‘This is how I heard about Bernie Sanders.’ You grab people with something funny. It’s kind of like click bait. It’s a blur, a flash, and you like that, so you go deeper. That’s kind of what a meme is. ‘Oh, funny picture. Funny meme with Bernie Sanders. Who’s Bernie Sanders?’”

The 2012 presidential election was dubbed the Meme Election, but the 2016 presidential race has seen a surge in political memes. Candidates joined the public in sharing memes, embracing them as a part of their new social media campaigns. In an election where Donald Trump touts the size of his hands (among other body parts) and Hillary Clinton proudly chills in Cedar Rapids, it’s unsurprising that memes have made their way onto the candidates’ social media pages.

One does not simply make a dank meme

Thanks in part to candidates’ lowest favorability ratings in recent history, and millennials surpassing the population of baby boomers to become the largest demographic of eligible voters, politicians are changing their marketing strategies in order to reach young voters.

“Authenticity is huge. That’s why you saw Bernie have so much success with a younger generation,” says Jay Lledo, social media manager at Los Angeles creative agency 180LA. “Millennials and younger voters ... like honest, authentic behavior, and I think meme culture does that often.”

People are more likely to perceive the messages of political memes as “more legitimate” than those of campaign ads, which are seen as “propaganda, a piece of messaging that is geared toward trying to change your mind about the candidate,” says Ann Crigler, professor of policial science at USC. Memes are a step in the move away from this “top-down kind of communication.”

Clinton’s social media efforts do show a desire to fit in on the internet, as she recently quote-tweeted Trump and added, “Delete your account,” a phrase appropriated from Twitter culture. The tweet became one of the most widely shared tweets during the campaign. “You could tell that someone on her side was like, ‘You need to make these bold actions to tap into that younger generation,’” Lledo says.

Very humor. So community. Wow.

Jason Steed, a Texas lawyer, made headlines for his tweet storm against Trump. He explains the social function of humor, a topic that he explored in his Ph.D. dissertation, as “a way we come together with others.”

When people form a “small public or community who all share and create that humor,” Graeff says, “you have a community of discourse,” which creates a platform and atmosphere for more public engagement.

In some cases, though, the communal aspects can overtake the humor itself. For Dowd, moderating his group “stopped being fun. Even before Bernie lost, it stopped being fun. Because people just stopped treating it like a meme page and treated it like a Bernie Sanders supporters support page.”

Although Sanders is no longer in the presidential race, there are still as many as 115,000 posts awaiting moderator approval in Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash.

“Once you look at the vast amount of memes and the way they tie in with different belief networks and communities, you notice that this is a significant new genre for our society,” says Tok Thompson, associate professor of anthropology and communication at USC.

All the Feels

Caitlin Remmel, who volunteered on the Bernie Sanders campaign, says the visual element of a meme contributes to the tone of the message, which “makes it spread like crazy and opens people’s minds up to the idea of, ‘Maybe I’ll follow this crazy socialist and find out that he’s not crazy and that I really believe in what he says.’”

Information-seeking behavior may also result from the “sense of emotion” the memes create, Crigler says. “If it makes you just laugh, then you probably wouldn’t seek further information because it’s not associated with an emotion that would do that, such as fear,” she says.

Erhardt Graeff, a Ph.D. researcher at MIT, says that, even if there is not a sense of fear inflicted, the desire to understand topical memes can drive consumers to research political topics. “If you don’t understand the underlying political issue,” he says, “the jokes aren’t that funny.”

I had fun once. It was awful.

“The thing that’s great about the meme is that it’s more like the candidate’s version of a political ad or a cartoonist’s version of the political cartoon in that it captures so much so quickly,” Crigler says. “It’s a very effective way of communicating.”

Graeff says, “This changes the nature of how the campaigns think about communications because it’s not just one-way anymore. It has to be two-way.”

Trump often interacts with his followers on Twitter and even retweets some memes that people create of him. This kind of indirect interaction between the candidate and the public draws in further potential conversation.

“It’s great from a democratic point of view that citizens have more power and that candidates are listening to what they’re saying,” says Pablo Barberá, assistant professor of international relations at USC.

That Escalated Quickly

Facebook also adapted in a way that caters to the hyper-shareable nature of memes by implementing a new algorithm in 2014.

“There’s been so much content out there that they’ve had to create an algorithm, so that users are being fed content and the platform knows the type of content you want to engage with,” Lledo says. “So when it comes to specifically politics, you are basically seeing a bunch of content that is in line with your beliefs or your political stance.”

Lledo warns that this algorithm further polarizes users by limiting the type of content they see on their news feeds. “I’m always seeing stuff that I agree with, and I’m never given the opportunity to see the counterargument. That stuff is just not populating my feed. So everything on my feed just strengthens my already existing beliefs, which kinda sucks, to be honest. But it’s just the way the platforms are being created.”

Despite the polarizing nature of memes, many people are saying that they are a helpful tool for easily understanding the political landscape. Cade Huseby, a high school student, says, “As a teenager, I can curate my Instagram and Facebook feeds to show me more of these memes because they’re something that I find really funny, and they help me understand the political aspects of everyday life through the humor that they present.”

Some voters could take a page from Huseby’s book and brush up on memes to prepare for the upcoming election.

TL;DR: Elections were more entertaining before memes came along. Said no one ever.