If social media has not played a significant role this year, then I don’t know my alphabet… and as I’m writing this, I’d like to think I know my alphabet.
The power and influence that social media has in our everyday lives continues to be underrated by society. We have seen social media impact every aspect of our lives, even in topics such as civil rights and presidential campaigns (even if its to see an orange have unrestricted access to twitter!). Whilst designed to keep us all together and in contact with one another, do we really consider how influential our Facebook feeds may be to our everyday lives?
One of the things we see more often than not on our Facebook or Instagram feeds is a good old meme. But we find that the power that a meme can hold, is often overlooked. Except in reference to meme warfare, where we find our light-hearted jokes to be taken over by politics and legislation.
Our key example of meme warfare in action would be the 2016 Presidential Campaign in the United States where supporters of Donald Trump were able to spread memes that had motives behind them and subliminally influencing the campaign – and as we see on twitter today, it worked in aiding his election as the President of the United States.
We find that memes have become so popular in our modern-day society and are often used in a warfare setting that some are forced to be removed or even banned. Briefly, take for example the EU bill of Article 13, a directive on Copyright requires online platforms to remove and delete copyrighted material from their platforms. This sparked outrage because when we make memes it is often based on copyrighted images, so many believe this article to be known as the ‘meme ban’.
Overall, whilst this is a brief overview of meme warfare in our current times on social media, meme warfare holds an extensive amount of power on us and without our knowledge can influence the way that we think about something because we saw a funny meme about it on Facebook the other day.
AMC Blogs 
I love the personality you bring into this piece, it makes it really easy to read! Your explanation of meme warfare is very clear and precise and relatable which definitely added to the readability of this post. It’s crazy to think that what started out as a tool in humour can now be shaping the way we think, and you explore this aspect of memetic warfare really well!
LikeLike