The 2016 Meme War

2016

Date: January-November 2016 · Place: 4chan /pol/ · Reddit r/The_Donald · Twitter · Facebook · Figures: Donald Trump, candidate · Hillary Clinton, candidate · /pol/ posters, anonymous · The_Donald moderators · Tags: Election, ImageBoard, Propaganda 01. Centaur Campaign Through 2016 the Trump campaign benefits from a parallel volunteer image-production army on 4chan's /pol/ and Reddit's r/The_Donald. The campaign does not commission this output. The output exceeds anything the campaign could commission. Daily, often hourly, anonymous users generate image macros, photoshops, edited debate clips, fake Hillary tweets, Pepe variants, and reaction GIFs. The good ones are upvoted to the top of The_Donald, screenshot, and rebroadcast to mainstream platforms. 02. Asymmetry The Clinton campaign attempts an equivalent. The output is corporate, on-message, and dead on arrival. 'Pokemon GO to the polls' is delivered from a podium in Virginia on 14 July 2016 and is mocked the same evening. The asymmetry is structural. One side runs a campaign and tries to be funny. The other runs a campaign that hosts and amplifies the funniest work of an anonymous decentralized labor force. 03. Hillary for Prison The meme war's signature artifact is not a single image but a tone: ironic, contemptuous, transgressive, fluent in the conventions of imageboard humor. 'Hillary for Prison' shirts, 'Lock her up' chants at rallies, the cartoon frog with a MAGA hat, all rhyme. On 9 November the result arrives. Election-night /pol/ threads run to thousands of replies. The board calls it 'meme magic.' The losing side calls it many things, none of which describe a counter-strategy. Sources • Whitney Phillips, 'The Oxygen of Amplification,' Data & Society, May 2018 • Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, Brian Friedberg, 'Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America' (Bloomsbury, 2022) • Andrew Marantz, 'Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation' (Viking, 2019)