6 ms·

World War Meme

37 points by Red_Tarsius 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
013a 10y ago
Its sad how many news outlets grapple to find some excuse for Trump's meteoric rise to power besides the obvious one; a massive voter-base of disenfranchised American workers, nearly completely ignored by the administrations of the past 25 years. And they're still being ignored by the press, if this article is any indication. Wait. Sorry, I'm the crazy one. Its the memes. The dank pepe memes are what helped him win. How could Hillary have been so blind?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- andrepd 10y ago
  A good rule of thumb is that if you are 100% sure of the obvious reason for a problem there is no consensus about you're probably wrong.
  - jimmykennedy 10y ago
    This is almost verbatim what my 9/11 Truther college buddy would say. I'm not convinced it's a good rule of thumb. It's way too easy to say "there's no consensus on chemtrails/evolution/etc"
    - derrickdirge 10y ago
      Except that there is a consensus on those things. It's just not unanimous.
  - ythn 10y ago
    Maybe not 100%, but Occam's Razor suggests disenfranchised voter groups are the underlying reason Trump won, not dank memes. Of course Occam's Razor doesn't always point to the correct answer, just the simplest one.
    - derrickdirge 10y ago
      Can you demonstrate that the 'disenfranchised voters' argument requires fewer assumptions than the 'meme' argument?
- Shivetya 10y ago
  the story being sold by the DNC and its sycophants both inside the press and outside is that Trump did not win the election, it was either stolen or given to him. This is the reaction of irrational people who can see no other solution other than those they come up with. In their ordered world all other opinions are those of the ignorant, the bigoted, and racist. As such they are all discounted if not ignored. Trump won because of who he wasn't and he took down to political establishments to do so. Why wouldn't they both be mad and worse the press who for too long decided instead of being journalist that they should be part of the story. I cannot recall a time in my life where I have seen so many stories from the press reporting on the press. So while the linked article has no real place on HN it is just indicative of a narrative being pushed by the losing side. Someone else gave it to him, we were never wrong or disliked, we were cheated. (we as in them)
- Chestofdraw 10y ago
  > a massive voter-base of disenfranchised American workers, nearly completely ignored by the administrations of the past 25 years. I think most people accept that but it does still leave the question, 'why Trump?'
  - mantas 10y ago
    Because those people saw him as lesser evil compared to Clinton? If there was another not-Clinton candidate, they'd have voted for him/her. It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe.
    - maxxxxx 10y ago
      I think Sanders woukd have had a good shot.
    - LyndsySimon 10y ago
      > Because those people saw him as lesser evil compared to Clinton? If there was another not-Clinton candidate, they'd have voted for him/her. As a Trump voter - but not a Republican - this pretty much sums it up. His SCOTUS list and the formation of his "Second Amendment Coalition" nudged me from the "he's better than Clinton" to the "maybe he'll deliver something I want" column, but there are no circumstances where I would have voted Clinton. > It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe. I think it would have been a slaughter in that case, instead of the squeaker it was. Trump's biggest challenge was winning over the libertarian wing of the GOP. If he were against Sanders, that part of the party would have been locked down from day one.
      - lostcolony 10y ago
        That part of the party was never going to vote for Clinton though. The question was do they vote (for Trump), or stay home. Sanders would have had a much better chance with moderates, independents, the anti-establishment groups, etc.
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
- laumars 10y ago
  And why does he resonate with disenfranchised American workers? He's policies were ill conceived and in many cases worse for that voter base than the administration that preceded him. But because he spoke their language they adopted him regardless of the political blunders he made during his campaign. Which means memes and other non-conventional methods of promotion really helped sell Trump as an alternative to the convention because they speak to the working class in the way that career politicians seldom achieve (not for want of trying). So your comments aren't mutually exclusive from the points made in the article.
  - 013a 10y ago
    There's a disconnect between actual policy and campaign rhetoric. His campaign rhetoric targeted, among other groups, the disenfranchised American worker. Whether his policy actually helps this group is irrelevant; the point is that he targeted them and they believed him.
    - bryanlarsen 10y ago
      "he targeted them and they believed him." So memes, then.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  I really hate to burn Karma, but I'm going to disagree.None of the polling data bares out your assessment. The majority of his voters were not poor ex-coal miners. The average income was somewhere around $70K/year.
  - pottersbasilisk 10y ago
    The majority of anyones base cant be just coal miners. President Trump campaigned heavily in swing states he correctly thought he could flip, while Hillary didnt.
  - wopwopwop 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution
    - mirimir 10y ago
      Right, the mean is meaningless.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    It wasn't strictly about income as measured in numbers, it was about social class. We have a really hard time talking about and grappling with social class in this country, but it's a fundamental force, as it is in nearly all cultures throughout history. There are many divisions and shorthand ways of trying to describe the divide, and none are fully satisfying, but one of them is that some people are economically threatened by rapidly accelerating technology, and some are economically empowered. Another is that some people are threatened by trade, and some profit from it. And so on. The global economy is changing rapidly, the distribution of wealth is becoming more unequal, and not everybody is thriving in that context. Talking about it in raw dollar terms in the aggregate has value, but it's one of many data points. Class resentment is a powerful force that has underpinned nearly every major political realignment in history, I'm not sure why everyone has such a hard time seeing it.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    From a statistics point of view, mean is a very dubious and untelling metric. Adding a mode, median, and interquartile ranges will help tremendously in finding where the "bulk" of Trump voters lay. If nothing else, I'm sure you know that one big outlier can skew the entire data sheet, for instance, like Peter Thiel?
- rev_null 10y ago
  Didn't the majority of voters _not_ vote for Trump? The massive voter base is still the minority and it's easier to blame meme magic than to re-evaluate a dysfunctional system of democracy.
  - anonnyj 10y ago
    The game isn't raw vote count, so Trump didn't optimize for that.
tomp 10y ago
> There is no real evidence that memes won the election Yet still enough to write this article? Or is this article Fake News™? > but there is little question they changed its tone Correlation doesn't equal causation. What if Trump's popularity resulted in a torrent of pro-Trump memes? In general, I find it much more likely that both the memes and Trump were caused (or at least influenced) by a third factor, e.g. the incresingly hostile culture of political correctness in mainstream media.
- mirimir 10y ago
  "I did it for the lulz." is the best explanation, I think.
croon 10y ago
I'm not so interested in what caused what, but more of why the visible rhetoric is memes and Trump tweets and soundbites, and devoid of coherent plans and policies.
- mirimir 10y ago
  WYSIWYG, I think. Also, loose lips sink ships.
ungzd 10y ago
But hypothesis that memes helped Trump win (and also helped brexit) is itself a metaironic dank meme. I'm not even sure that all these "fake news", "alt right" exist. And isn't 4chan something from the past like Myspace, is there still any active users? Or there left only 2 insane anonymouses who write all the posts?
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  >I'm not even sure that all these "fake news", "alt right" exist. BuzzFeed News tracked down and spoke to Macedonian teenagers who created over 100 fake news sites, who readily admit it. They were pro-trump sites because pro-trump stories made the most money, not because of any political ideology. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... >"Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading but the rationale is that 'if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it,'" said a university student in Veles who started a US politics site
  - justaman 10y ago
    Wow, did buzzfeed makes something of substance....?!!
    - nommm-nommm 10y ago
      BuzzFeed News is a source of original investigative journalism. The publish a lot of substance, check out some of their other work.
    - stagbeetle 10y ago
      They did the ole switcharoo. Garnered intense notoriety and then used that infamy to push their real journal. The clickbait and listicles are only to keep the lights on.
- wooshy 10y ago
  4chan still has a very active community.
maxlybbert 10y ago
For as long as I can remember, every election is followed by the losing political party claiming either (1) they didn't do a good job with marketing, or (2) the other side does marketing better. The political parties never publicly state that the voters disagreed with their platform, or that their platform was focused on the wrong things, or that the voters were willing to take a gamble on something new, etc. It's always the case that the voters would have chosen their party if they had run better ads, or more ads, or ads in different places, etc.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The electoral college decided the election. Voter sentiment was at least even, or favored Clinton. So the mechanics of marketing and such were really an important factor in the election. Hopeful, empty rhetoric about jobs just might have won the election for Clinton. Instead there were gaffes and silence.
  - maxlybbert 10y ago
    Maybe this election really came down to marketing. However, when every post-mortem amounts to "we don't need to change the party platform; we just need to work on messaging" I start to wonder if the post-mortems do any good. Sometimes you need a shake up.
pottersbasilisk 10y ago
I personally think memes only happened because so many people were already primed for change of the status quo.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Maybe more like ready to burn the damn thing down.
BickNowstrom 10y ago
There are at least a few Great Meme War veterans who truly believe they made a difference: "I helped meme a President into office, cucks" - Gab.ai CEO Andrew Torba. If any effect came from 4chan /pol/ it was because the mainstream validated them and tried to categorize them as a coherent whole: The Alt-Right. Anonymous self-marginalizes. It was the Hillary campaign who drew attention to Pepe the Frog and made it part of the common discourse. And no word (yet) in this article about Russian influence on social media and political campaigns. Even though the far-right plays a clear role in that propaganda machine.
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  > "I helped meme a President into office, cucks" - Gab.ai CEO Andrew Torba. Reading that, I thought is was an innocent meme and would pave the way for free and open expression of memes. But, after reading the full story it's sad he had to get violent about it.
- rvcamo 10y ago
  1. You're damn right we made a difference. 2. I'm not alt-right(whatever that even means,) and have never claimed to be. 3."Muh Russia!" What a cuck.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
It seems to me that the memes (in the wider sense, not image macros) that won it for him were primarly spread by Fox News, with talk radio, infowars, various think tanks etc. thrown in. If we did focus only on the internet I'd suggest "forwards from grandma" on Facebook are another contributor, usually with the content coming indirectly from the above sources. But I don't really see the evidence to give any credit to these youngsters with their new-fangled pepes. I started twigging that Trump would win by watching video journalists who visited the heartlands of america and did vox pops with random people. Their opinions about politics seemed to have no basis in any reality I recognized. A very nice chairwoman of a Republican committee said "There was no racism before Obama" for example. This wasn't some spittle-flecked ideologue, just an average old lady happily offering her opinion on politics.
sixhobbits 10y ago
I'm not American, but noticed a strong difference in memes leading up to each of the last three elections. I have no numbers, but I noticed that there seemed to be an unnatural amount of pro-Obama memes that spread before the '08 and '12 elections. They were high quality and spread fast. In my (largely liberal/progressive) social media bubble, I noticed very few pro-Trump memes before the the '16 elections, but huge numbers of anti-Hillary ones. As I said I don't have numbers and I don't know what kind of effect memes actually have, as they are largely consumed by young non-voters, but it's not secret that Obama had a very active meme-team and it makes sense for Trump to have followed the strategy.

37 points by Red_Tarsius 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

013a 10y ago

Its sad how many news outlets grapple to find some excuse for Trump's meteoric rise to power besides the obvious one; a massive voter-base of disenfranchised American workers, nearly completely ignored by the administrations of the past 25 years. And they're still being ignored by the press, if this article is any indication. Wait. Sorry, I'm the crazy one. Its the memes. The dank pepe memes are what helped him win. How could Hillary have been so blind?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
andrepd 10y ago
A good rule of thumb is that if you are 100% sure of the obvious reason for a problem there is no consensus about you're probably wrong.
- jimmykennedy 10y ago
  This is almost verbatim what my 9/11 Truther college buddy would say. I'm not convinced it's a good rule of thumb. It's way too easy to say "there's no consensus on chemtrails/evolution/etc"
  - derrickdirge 10y ago
    Except that there is a consensus on those things. It's just not unanimous.
- ythn 10y ago
  Maybe not 100%, but Occam's Razor suggests disenfranchised voter groups are the underlying reason Trump won, not dank memes. Of course Occam's Razor doesn't always point to the correct answer, just the simplest one.
  - derrickdirge 10y ago
    Can you demonstrate that the 'disenfranchised voters' argument requires fewer assumptions than the 'meme' argument?
Shivetya 10y ago
the story being sold by the DNC and its sycophants both inside the press and outside is that Trump did not win the election, it was either stolen or given to him. This is the reaction of irrational people who can see no other solution other than those they come up with. In their ordered world all other opinions are those of the ignorant, the bigoted, and racist. As such they are all discounted if not ignored. Trump won because of who he wasn't and he took down to political establishments to do so. Why wouldn't they both be mad and worse the press who for too long decided instead of being journalist that they should be part of the story. I cannot recall a time in my life where I have seen so many stories from the press reporting on the press. So while the linked article has no real place on HN it is just indicative of a narrative being pushed by the losing side. Someone else gave it to him, we were never wrong or disliked, we were cheated. (we as in them)
Chestofdraw 10y ago
> a massive voter-base of disenfranchised American workers, nearly completely ignored by the administrations of the past 25 years. I think most people accept that but it does still leave the question, 'why Trump?'
- mantas 10y ago
  Because those people saw him as lesser evil compared to Clinton? If there was another not-Clinton candidate, they'd have voted for him/her. It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe.
  - maxxxxx 10y ago
    I think Sanders woukd have had a good shot.
  - LyndsySimon 10y ago
    > Because those people saw him as lesser evil compared to Clinton? If there was another not-Clinton candidate, they'd have voted for him/her. As a Trump voter - but not a Republican - this pretty much sums it up. His SCOTUS list and the formation of his "Second Amendment Coalition" nudged me from the "he's better than Clinton" to the "maybe he'll deliver something I want" column, but there are no circumstances where I would have voted Clinton. > It'd be interesting to see Sanders vs Trump in parallel universe. I think it would have been a slaughter in that case, instead of the squeaker it was. Trump's biggest challenge was winning over the libertarian wing of the GOP. If he were against Sanders, that part of the party would have been locked down from day one.
    - lostcolony 10y ago
      That part of the party was never going to vote for Clinton though. The question was do they vote (for Trump), or stay home. Sanders would have had a much better chance with moderates, independents, the anti-establishment groups, etc.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
laumars 10y ago
And why does he resonate with disenfranchised American workers? He's policies were ill conceived and in many cases worse for that voter base than the administration that preceded him. But because he spoke their language they adopted him regardless of the political blunders he made during his campaign. Which means memes and other non-conventional methods of promotion really helped sell Trump as an alternative to the convention because they speak to the working class in the way that career politicians seldom achieve (not for want of trying). So your comments aren't mutually exclusive from the points made in the article.
- 013a 10y ago
  There's a disconnect between actual policy and campaign rhetoric. His campaign rhetoric targeted, among other groups, the disenfranchised American worker. Whether his policy actually helps this group is irrelevant; the point is that he targeted them and they believed him.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    "he targeted them and they believed him." So memes, then.
alistproducer2 10y ago
I really hate to burn Karma, but I'm going to disagree.None of the polling data bares out your assessment. The majority of his voters were not poor ex-coal miners. The average income was somewhere around $70K/year.
- pottersbasilisk 10y ago
  The majority of anyones base cant be just coal miners. President Trump campaigned heavily in swing states he correctly thought he could flip, while Hillary didnt.
- wopwopwop 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Right, the mean is meaningless.
- CPLX 10y ago
  It wasn't strictly about income as measured in numbers, it was about social class. We have a really hard time talking about and grappling with social class in this country, but it's a fundamental force, as it is in nearly all cultures throughout history. There are many divisions and shorthand ways of trying to describe the divide, and none are fully satisfying, but one of them is that some people are economically threatened by rapidly accelerating technology, and some are economically empowered. Another is that some people are threatened by trade, and some profit from it. And so on. The global economy is changing rapidly, the distribution of wealth is becoming more unequal, and not everybody is thriving in that context. Talking about it in raw dollar terms in the aggregate has value, but it's one of many data points. Class resentment is a powerful force that has underpinned nearly every major political realignment in history, I'm not sure why everyone has such a hard time seeing it.
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  From a statistics point of view, mean is a very dubious and untelling metric. Adding a mode, median, and interquartile ranges will help tremendously in finding where the "bulk" of Trump voters lay. If nothing else, I'm sure you know that one big outlier can skew the entire data sheet, for instance, like Peter Thiel?
rev_null 10y ago
Didn't the majority of voters _not_ vote for Trump? The massive voter base is still the minority and it's easier to blame meme magic than to re-evaluate a dysfunctional system of democracy.
- anonnyj 10y ago
  The game isn't raw vote count, so Trump didn't optimize for that.

tomp 10y ago

> There is no real evidence that memes won the election Yet still enough to write this article? Or is this article Fake News™? > but there is little question they changed its tone Correlation doesn't equal causation. What if Trump's popularity resulted in a torrent of pro-Trump memes? In general, I find it much more likely that both the memes and Trump were caused (or at least influenced) by a third factor, e.g. the incresingly hostile culture of political correctness in mainstream media.

mirimir 10y ago
"I did it for the lulz." is the best explanation, I think.

croon 10y ago

I'm not so interested in what caused what, but more of why the visible rhetoric is memes and Trump tweets and soundbites, and devoid of coherent plans and policies.

mirimir 10y ago
WYSIWYG, I think. Also, loose lips sink ships.

ungzd 10y ago

But hypothesis that memes helped Trump win (and also helped brexit) is itself a metaironic dank meme. I'm not even sure that all these "fake news", "alt right" exist. And isn't 4chan something from the past like Myspace, is there still any active users? Or there left only 2 insane anonymouses who write all the posts?

nommm-nommm 10y ago
>I'm not even sure that all these "fake news", "alt right" exist. BuzzFeed News tracked down and spoke to Macedonian teenagers who created over 100 fake news sites, who readily admit it. They were pro-trump sites because pro-trump stories made the most money, not because of any political ideology. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... >"Yes, the info in the blogs is bad, false, and misleading but the rationale is that 'if it gets the people to click on it and engage, then use it,'" said a university student in Veles who started a US politics site
- justaman 10y ago
  Wow, did buzzfeed makes something of substance....?!!
  - nommm-nommm 10y ago
    BuzzFeed News is a source of original investigative journalism. The publish a lot of substance, check out some of their other work.
  - stagbeetle 10y ago
    They did the ole switcharoo. Garnered intense notoriety and then used that infamy to push their real journal. The clickbait and listicles are only to keep the lights on.
wooshy 10y ago
4chan still has a very active community.

maxlybbert 10y ago

For as long as I can remember, every election is followed by the losing political party claiming either (1) they didn't do a good job with marketing, or (2) the other side does marketing better. The political parties never publicly state that the voters disagreed with their platform, or that their platform was focused on the wrong things, or that the voters were willing to take a gamble on something new, etc. It's always the case that the voters would have chosen their party if they had run better ads, or more ads, or ads in different places, etc.

maxerickson 10y ago
The electoral college decided the election. Voter sentiment was at least even, or favored Clinton. So the mechanics of marketing and such were really an important factor in the election. Hopeful, empty rhetoric about jobs just might have won the election for Clinton. Instead there were gaffes and silence.
- maxlybbert 10y ago
  Maybe this election really came down to marketing. However, when every post-mortem amounts to "we don't need to change the party platform; we just need to work on messaging" I start to wonder if the post-mortems do any good. Sometimes you need a shake up.

pottersbasilisk 10y ago

I personally think memes only happened because so many people were already primed for change of the status quo.

mirimir 10y ago
Maybe more like ready to burn the damn thing down.

BickNowstrom 10y ago

There are at least a few Great Meme War veterans who truly believe they made a difference: "I helped meme a President into office, cucks" - Gab.ai CEO Andrew Torba. If any effect came from 4chan /pol/ it was because the mainstream validated them and tried to categorize them as a coherent whole: The Alt-Right. Anonymous self-marginalizes. It was the Hillary campaign who drew attention to Pepe the Frog and made it part of the common discourse. And no word (yet) in this article about Russian influence on social media and political campaigns. Even though the far-right plays a clear role in that propaganda machine.

stagbeetle 10y ago
> "I helped meme a President into office, cucks" - Gab.ai CEO Andrew Torba. Reading that, I thought is was an innocent meme and would pave the way for free and open expression of memes. But, after reading the full story it's sad he had to get violent about it.
rvcamo 10y ago
1. You're damn right we made a difference. 2. I'm not alt-right(whatever that even means,) and have never claimed to be. 3."Muh Russia!" What a cuck.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

It seems to me that the memes (in the wider sense, not image macros) that won it for him were primarly spread by Fox News, with talk radio, infowars, various think tanks etc. thrown in. If we did focus only on the internet I'd suggest "forwards from grandma" on Facebook are another contributor, usually with the content coming indirectly from the above sources. But I don't really see the evidence to give any credit to these youngsters with their new-fangled pepes. I started twigging that Trump would win by watching video journalists who visited the heartlands of america and did vox pops with random people. Their opinions about politics seemed to have no basis in any reality I recognized. A very nice chairwoman of a Republican committee said "There was no racism before Obama" for example. This wasn't some spittle-flecked ideologue, just an average old lady happily offering her opinion on politics.

sixhobbits 10y ago

I'm not American, but noticed a strong difference in memes leading up to each of the last three elections. I have no numbers, but I noticed that there seemed to be an unnatural amount of pro-Obama memes that spread before the '08 and '12 elections. They were high quality and spread fast. In my (largely liberal/progressive) social media bubble, I noticed very few pro-Trump memes before the the '16 elections, but huge numbers of anti-Hillary ones. As I said I don't have numbers and I don't know what kind of effect memes actually have, as they are largely consumed by young non-voters, but it's not secret that Obama had a very active meme-team and it makes sense for Trump to have followed the strategy.