“Meme Wars:” The Digital Underworld That Led to Jan. 6

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now the internet has been redefining American politics as politicians and extremist groups make use of memes. Once dismissed as an online joke, they now wield significant power to attack opponents and energize a base. Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfuss investigate this digital underworld in their new book, Meme Wars. And they join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the power they wield.

HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR HOST: Christiane, thanks. Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, thank you both for joining us. We’re having this conversation just days after Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House was attacked, violating his home. And we are finding out more information about the attacker and how he subscribed to so many of these ideas online that perhaps led him to this attack. And so first, I guess, for our audience, just a clarification of what’s the difference between subscribing to an idea, and a meme.

EMILY DREYFUSS, CO-AUTHOR, “MEME WARS”: So any idea has the potential to become a meme, but it only becomes a meme if it resonates and can go viral and travels through cultures and through people. So one of the memes that this attacker that this violent attacker we know was interested in and share it online is a meme called it’s OK to be white, which is a slogan. People sometimes think of memes as only being images with some text over them on the internet. But a political meme, a meme predates the internet and can be anything from a hash tag to a phrase to an image and this, it’s OK to be white campaign that this person who attacked Paul Pelosi subscribed to and cared about Joan and I and our co-author, Brian, have looked into deeply and it was a disinformation campaign left on the internet for folks like this person to find, and then be taken down the rabbit hole with. It seems like this person who then ended up attacking the husband of the Speaker of the House was inspired by a lot of these resonant ideas, these resonant memes that have come to him via the Internet and other ways. And that is what we’re talking about when we talk about meme warfare and mimetic communities.

SREENIVASAN: Joan, you and I have spoken on multiple occasions about sort of different controversies different ways the internet works. And sadly, when I looked at your book, there were so many examples of what I guess we could consider, oh, that’s just the internet, turning into actual physical violence in the real world. And you all three of you do a great job of kind of drawing those connections between why it’s even important not just to read this book, but to study what’s happening and realize that connection between the online world and the offline world.

JOAN DONOVAN, CO-AUTHOR, “MEME WARS”: Yes, I think, to your point, one of the things that our book tries to show is that things online do matter. They do have political uptake and political consequences. And so we wanted to explain to people how memes were influencing political communication. And in particular, show it historically by using memes as some of the main characters in the book. So we begin with Occupy which is the Occupy Wall Street movement, which many people will remember, as a leftist anarchist movement in our chapter on occupy really delves into how the right wing and the far right as well as libertarians and anarchists learned how to use the internet to their advantage to spread their fringe messaging and so central figures in that chapter are unlikely to appear and other occupy histories such as Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Andrew Breitbart, and of course, Rand Paul, who was leading a very, very large online social movements. Now, with Occupy, what we show is that ideas do move people off of the internet and into the streets. And we’ve seen that happen many, many times with hashtag movements. But what’s different about where the book goes is we trace how people get subsumed by these lies, and these disinformation campaigns and how memes become so important in the transmission of hate, harassment and incitement online. And so we do a 10 year history, starting with Occupy and ending with stop the steal, because we believe that the internet is fundamentally revolutionising communications, and with it, all of our social institutions.

SREENIVASAN: Emily, what’s also interesting, as you point out, both in the author of in the book is almost like a spiraling effect where there might be something that exists on the internet, but then a real world incident actually adds more fuel almost creates more memes, and then it goes back online. And then more people hear about it sort of, you know, in January 6 you started to see that where I mean, stop the steal, as you all point out, that wasn’t by accident that that phrase sort of trended but then with the words that the President was saying, and with what was happening in real time, you saw kind of an evolution of things.

DREYFUSS: Yes, so it’s a cycle. And we call it a meme war. When something happens online, people are excited about it. So stop the steal was this hashtag phrase that was actually coined by Roger Stone, who registered a website called Stop the Steal in 2015. Because he thought that Donald Trump would not get the nomination for the Republican presidency, because if we can go back in our minds, remember, the GOP did not want him to be the nominee. So Stone, who was working for him registered this website, in anticipation of being able to launch a campaign to say they stole the nomination from him. Well, it didn’t work. He did get the nomination. So he held that idea, that resonant meme in reserve for when it was needed. And then the thing about any kind of a conspiracy theory, or an idea or any of these things, is they work, they go viral when they play on something that feels true, right? You don’t — you don’t get conspiracy theories that don’t resonate in some way with some kind of part of someone’s experience. And so that idea resonated with some people for various reasons, like all sorts of reasons. And what happens is when it resonates online, then if the residents get strong enough, they’ll go into the real world and do something. And then this is where it becomes a meme war. Because in order for it to go even more powerfully, and lead to something like January 6, you need in real life, there to be some kind of spectacle or violence or something that prompts a ton of media attention and attention from other people, which then grows the campaign. And that’s what happened with stop the steal, it grew. It’s snowballed. Like they are building momentum. One of the things that we and I consider myself a member of the mainstream press still, and not just mainstream press, but also like the institutional government, like the Democrats and the systems that are set up in the government, they kind of saw those things, but we’re like, Well, those are weirdos like that we can ignore or not, or if we can’t ignore them, we’ll like tisk, tisk them, point out how crazy they are. But we don’t need to worry that they represent maybe like the tip of an iceberg. But the truth is that when these movements move back and forth online like that, they continue building momentum and building momentum. And all of those road shows, the stop the steal road shows that people were laughing about and making jokes on Twitter, they contributed to the momentum of getting people to the Capitol on January 6.

SREENIVASAN: Joan, what was it about President Trump where he understood that this is a form of communication, and he tapped into it in a way that the political left hasn’t and frankly, right now, you see many members of the Republican and further right wing of the Republican Party, understanding this conversation and saying that this is where my constituents are. This is where my base is, this is what I need to espouse, or certainly not deny.

DONOVAN: Yes, I think when it comes to trying to understand how the left or the right use memes, there’s a couple of fundamental features that our book outlines about memes in general usually they need to be anonymous. It should elicit participation that is people should feel like they’re part of the messaging. And they’re part of the meme war. And Trump and people on the far right in particular knew this very well. And they also knew that they could use memes to carry their messages without having to show who they were, without having to show their true motivations. This kind of communication has gotten a lot easier. It accomplishes the certain goals of power, politics and even fun or chaos. And on the right, they have recourse to much more transgressive styles of irony and humor that people on the left would find completely offensive. And so it’s not surprising. I’ll take a contemporary example right now that you saw the adaptation of a meme like, OK, Boomer, which was something funny for young people to say to anyone over 30, essentially, about them just not getting it that adapted into OK, Groomer. And it’s a trans slur. And the reason why they chose groomer, and if you watch enough of the media about the people who make these memes, they just lay out their rationale, which was simply that if you call someone a pedophile online, you would likely be breaking Terms of Service, because you’d be accusing them of a crime and you would lose your accounts or you lose your tweet. So they chose groomers specifically, because of the content moderation reaction, it took months and months and months for Twitter to start reacting. But here, we now have, you know, at the dawn of the midterms here, a serious wedge issue around trans people’s right to exist. And so these content problems or content, moderation problems, do become cultural issues, cultural wedge issues, and they can trade up the chain all the way into mainstream politics. We have to — we have to stop thinking about it as low culture, because of someone like Trump who’s was very good at adapting memes that we’re already out there. We have to be very careful to make sure that we focus on the political violence committed against the Pelosis, this is, you know, an assassination attempt that we have witnessed. And we don’t want to be shooting down Twitter misinformation that somehow this was a lover’s quarrel or something like that. So, it’s really important that we don’t let these kinds of memes get too sticky. Or else we’re back into a situation like we were with Sandy Hook, where we’re discussing crisis actors instead of the actual tragedy.

DREYFUSS: You know, a lot of the memes that it looks like this guy who attacked and tried to kidnap and, and hurt Nancy Pelosi and attacked her husband, a lot of the memes he trafficked in our explicit violent rhetoric, you know, but they’ll have a joke as part of it. And I do think that we in the mainstream media and in the mainstream culture have often considered that if there’s a joke, if people are laughing at it, they can’t actually mean it. And that we need to be much more comfortable understanding that people can be serious and laughing at the exact same time and we need to like we what we’re trying to do with Meme Wars the book, is to like, bring back the curtain and say like, the irony on top is a protective layer, hoping that you will miss the actual dangerous substance behind.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a phrase in your book politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from the infrastructure and when you’re talking about infrastructure, the internet infrastructure comes to mind. Right now we have a billionaire that successfully has purchased what he wants to be the town square of the Internet, whether he’s successful or not, it’s kind of a whole another half hour conversation we could have but, so Joan, do you think that Elon’s takeover good, bad, indifferent unknown?

DONOVAN: For right now, it’s unknown what’s, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball. If I did, I’d be in a different business. But, you know, but I do think it’s — it is bad to have a single — the single richest, richest man in the world also in charge of one of the most important communication platforms globally, given the fact that when he does typically dip a toe into geopolitical issues, he tends to be on the side of authoritarians. And so, we have to realize that when we talk about infrastructure as an important piece of our politics. Our politics often reflects the values of our infrastructure. And if our infrastructure is going to be sliding into this direction, where hate harassment and incitements are part of the normal course of things, then we’re going to see that reflected in our politics. And likely, it is already showing up in these new kinds of political violence, and networked incitement.

SREENIVASAN: Taking a step back, Emily, at some point watching this conversation, we will see this is still Twitter’s so an online community. So what if the richest man in the world owns this thing? Or if, as he recently did, he shares a conspiracy theory in the wake of this attack of Nancy Pelosi’s husband that is totally false, and then he later deletes it. Why does it matter? Why should we care?

DREYFUSS: Twitter has an outsized influence on our culture in America in particular, mainly because of who is on there. You know, Twitter is a cauldron of elites, in a lot of ways what it happens on Twitter, what trends on Twitter, what the vibe is on Twitter ends up being, you know, smattered all over televisions on reproduced on, you know, in conversations that people are having in their house like I, you know, my husband, he’s not on Twitter. He doesn’t look at Twitter at all. But he’ll come home at the end of the day, and the stuff that has been happening on Twitter that I’ve been in the bowels of the internet, looking at exactly who made it and where it came in, who retweeted unquote who did it, he comes home, and he knows about it, because it made its way to the conversations at his office or to the radio because it gets picked up. So there’s one just basic fact like it has an out a louder voice in our culture than other places. Elon Musk represents a kind of technocrat who, of the Silicon Valley ilk who — and there is a growing number of folks who have this idea that as technologists, they know more than other people. And as someone who lives in this area, like I can tell you, a lot of people in Silicon Valley have this sense that hey, like we are the ones who’ve made this world the way it is and we know how it works and the government is broken and the system is broken. And this is a techno monarchist mindset that is insurgent in certain, very powerful circles, OK? And Elon is a part of that. Elon also is just a powerful troll in the same way that Donald Trump was like he — he’s funny, he’s transgressive. He’s using the internet in a silly way riling people up and, you know, it talked to any reporter who has been on the Musk beat or the Tesla beat for years. You know, Elon has no qualms sticking his networked group of fans on anyone. And we’ve seen that. I mean, that’s what got him sued when he called someone a pedophile on Twitter. He’s willing to engage in kind of targeted harassment that is the thing that can become so problematic. Elon already had millions and millions and millions and now he owns the actual means of cultural production of this system that has an outsized influence on our politics. And so, you know, you’ve been seeing all of these accounts now that there’s been more racism, more N word, more and — like outright anti-semitic stuff on Twitter since Musk’s takeover. And some people are like has he already changed the algorithm? Is he already tweaking things? And the fact is, you don’t have to tweak the algorithm yet to have to influence what kind of content is on Twitter because you give you can give a message a so you can make it clear to people make it seem to people like this is OK now. And so they’ll do it. They’ll engage in it.

SREENIVASAN: Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfuss, thank you both for joining us. The book is called Meme Wars.

DREYFUSS: Thank you so much.

DONOVAN: Thank you.