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Wellington, September 4, 2020
An expert in political satire has said that memes can be an incredibly powerful tool to add to debate, but internet users need to be savvy about where they come from and what kind of message they are pushing.
Memes are jokes shared online using text on top of pictures.
Distasteful politics
They are in the news after David Wong-Tung, who is the husband of National Party Leader Judith Collins, shared a variety that have been labelled distasteful.
The memes included some calling the Prime Minister ‘the Incredible Sulk’, or appropriating the language of the government’s Covid-19 response calling on people to ‘Unite Against Cindy-20’.
Wong-Tung also faced some nasty memes himself, with one depicting him as a chimpanzee.
Writer and former Labour staffer Sarah Austen-Smith, who holds a Master’s degree in Political Satire, told Morning Report memes are not all bad.
The positive side
“Generally, memes can level the playing field between creators, the public and the powerful. They can actually engage people in debate, and we have seen a wonderful comeback of political satire with meme culture,” she said.
The problems come when memes begin to appeal to nasty instincts of racism, sexism, and misinformation.
“Bad memes, I think, run a risk of eroding confidence in democracy. We have seen that overseas. They can be used to have the public lose faith in democratic institutions,” Ms Austen-Smith said.
Memes on Facebook
Meme pages have sprung up on Facebook in support of all of New Zealand’s main political parties. Most make it clear in the description the page is not officially affiliated to the Party on behalf of which it posts memes.
The most popular is the Labour Party-based “Backing the Kiwi Meme,” which has just under 54,500 likes, followed by the National Party-favouring “National Party’s Meme Working Group”, which has just over 22,000 likes.
A non-party-aligned page titled “NZ swing voters against dogmatic party affiliated memes” has nearly likes 18,000 likes.
Engagement strategy
Ms Austen-Smith said that she had checked in New Zealand meme pages and noted a change in them as the election neared.
“Last year, that content was quite soft, it was humour and LOLs. Now we are seeing more article shares, hard content. That is a deliberate engagement strategy by those pages to get people following with easy content and as soon as you build that following, you can start pushing out deliberate messaging.
“So, I suppose for me that the takeaway is this is all very deliberate, and people just need to be conscious of that,” she said.
Ms Austen-Smith does not think that legislation is much of an answer.
“I do not think that regulation is necessarily the way forward. I just think that people need to be a bit savvier about what we are seeing online and then understanding that it will not be by accident,” she said.
The above Report and Picture have been published under a Special Arrangement with www.rnz.co.nz
