Every time you open your TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook feed, the first thing you will most likely be met with are memes. While most of them are silly, lighthearted, and make you laugh, a few of them are dark humor, touching upon real-world social issues. Funny memes can make us laugh, but memes are often about very sensitive topics. While memes can be educational, it is also important to tread carefully when creating and consuming memes about serious topics. Memes that minimize the significance of issues should not be people’s sole source of information on those issues, and memes that are prejudicial towards a group of people are never appropriate.
While looking at political memes is not in and of itself problematic, getting your information from them is.
Generally, memes provide a highly oversimplified view of the events they describe, which can cause people who get their news from them to miss the full complexity. Memes make “things that should be treated with gravity, respect, and thought get treated in a shallow way,” Max Mardesich, a Berkeley High School junior, expressed. This can lead to widespread ignorance of political issues and prevent effective civic engagement.
Furthermore, memes have the ability to cause these contentious ideas to enter the public consciousness, which can enable activism and social change. This can also increase political polarization as more moderate ideas are replaced with more extreme ones.
Generally, memes may also fail to recognize and acknowledge that sensitive political issues like climate change and immigration affect real people. “Memes have a way of turning everything into a joke,” Mardesich said. They often use caricatures and/or represent an entire group of people as a singular entity. This can sometimes lighten the mood of a difficult topic, but can also be disparaging and offensive for the people that are targeted or inaccurately depicted by the meme. Unfortunately, memes that make jokes at the expense of a marginalized group have become dangerously common in our society, and they must stop. Even memes that are respectful of people’s identities can still be problematic if they fail to treat widespread issues with proper care and level of respect for the people they affect.
However, memes can sometimes be a healthy coping mechanism for stress over global events. They can help people process incidents that would normally be very scary to read about by using humor. For example, one meme depicts “the Titanic,” labeled “world leaders,” about to hit an iceberg, labeled “climate change,” with the caption: “It’s settled … We agree to sign a pledge to hold another meeting to consider changing course at a date yet to be determined.” This cartoon poked fun at the very serious concern that world leaders are shrugging off the existential threat of climate change looming over us and brought a little levity to the subject. However, it is important to never let the humor of memes detract from the true severity of the events. If you frequently view memes that trivialize a sensitive issue, you should also read high quality sources to get informed through nuanced perspectives on a given topic. If you want to take action on issues you care about, memes tend not to give you the information you need to do so.
Ultimately, memes are a part of social media that seems to be here to stay. They are an integral part of popular culture, they can be fun, but it is also possible for them to inflict harm by inflaming prejudice and promoting ignorance of sensitive topics. While enjoying memes, it is absolutely crucial to remember that although they are funny and make us laugh, they don’t always reveal the full truth. Memes can be a source of entertainment, but they should never be your source of information.