Memes, scenes and #ELXN2019s: How partisans make memes during elections

Abstract

Our article analyses partisan, user-generated Facebook pages and groups to understand the articulation of political identity and party identification. Adapting the concept of scenes usually found in music studies, these Facebook pages and groups act as partisan scenes that maintain identities and sentiments through participatory practices, principally by making and sharing memes. Using a mixed methods approach that combines social media data and interviews during the 2019 Canadian federal election, we find that these partisan scenes are an active part of elections and the overall political information cycle in Canada but endure beyond election cycles. Rather than trying to sway voters of different political affiliation and influence the election outcome, Facebook users employ memes to hang-out and build community, thereby reinforcing partisanship.

#JusticeforGeorgeFloyd: How Instagram facilitated the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests

“…Recent studies on political movements followed en suite. Meme pages and celebrities, for instance, have been recently characterized to spark instances of political participation in Morocco [34], maintain partisan identity in Canada [35], promote public health behavior [36], or facilitate misinformation [37]. Recent work has focused on the growing role of visuals in protests directly, such as the case of the Hong Kong Protests in 2019 [38].…”

Memeing Politics: Understanding Political Meme Creators, Audiences, and Consequences on Social Media

“…Intriguingly, however, we found that circulating memes did not relate to political interest or strength of partisanship—a finding that departs from other scholarship (Johann, 2022)—suggesting that posting political memes is a method of political expression utilized by a wide variety of individuals, including political moderates and the politically uninterested. 3 This is especially interesting given that much of the literature on political memes focuses on their use in partisan groups (e.g., Al-Rawi, 2021; McKelvey et al, 2021) and argues that meme authors are particularly polarized users (Paz et al, 2021). Although political memes can be used to establish like-minded communities online (McKelvey et al, 2021), our results suggest that memes are also created and shared by nonpartisan users as an everyday form of political expression.…”

“…3 This is especially interesting given that much of the literature on political memes focuses on their use in partisan groups (e.g., Al-Rawi, 2021; McKelvey et al, 2021) and argues that meme authors are particularly polarized users (Paz et al, 2021). Although political memes can be used to establish like-minded communities online (McKelvey et al, 2021), our results suggest that memes are also created and shared by nonpartisan users as an everyday form of political expression. Meme circulators were, likewise, not more likely to report high levels of participation in political activities or political knowledge; in fact, creators of memes were slightly less likely than other users to score high on political knowledge.…”

“…The first motivation behind meme sharing we investigate is that of politically persuading others online. Although some work indicates political memes are not primarily employed to sway voters or influence elections, but rather for purposes such as online community building (McKelvey et al, 2021), there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting memes are used as persuasion tools. Some users report that circulating memes allows them to voice political arguments and critiques in an accessible format (Penney, 2020).…”

“…Social media users who frequently circulate political memes may also be more politically partisan, due to the like-minded digital communities in which memes tend to flourish. Prior work indicates that people who circulate memes do so, in part, to establish online communities of like-minded thinkers (McKelvey et al, 2021) and achieve a sense of inter-group solidarity (Penney, 2020). Communities of meme circulators, such as meme pages on Instagram, are often politically polarized groups wherein memes clearly promote a specific political party and its candidates (Al-Rawi, 2021), and content analyses of political memes have identified high levels of polarized content in both liberal and conservative memes (Paz et al, 2021).…”