
World War Meme - Red_Tarsius
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-trump-supporters-trolls-internet-214856
======
013a
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?

~~~
alistproducer2
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.

~~~
wopwopwop
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution)

~~~
mirimir
Right, the mean is meaningless.

------
tomp
> 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
"I did it for the lulz." is the best explanation, I think.

------
ungzd
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
>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...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-
global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo)

>"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
Wow, did buzzfeed makes something of substance....?!!

~~~
stagbeetle
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.

------
maxlybbert
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
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
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.

------
croon
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
WYSIWYG, I think. Also, loose lips sink ships.

------
sixhobbits
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.

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BickNowstrom
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
> _" 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.

------
ZeroGravitas
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.

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

~~~
mirimir
Maybe more like ready to burn the damn thing down.

