DigitalDUAL-USE

Meme Warfare

What it is

The organized use of memes — image macros, catchphrases, remixable formats — as instruments of political and information conflict, valued because they spread through participation, carry a frame in seconds, and can be disowned by whoever launched them.

How it works

Richard Dawkins coined meme in 1976 for a unit of culture that replicates by imitation; Limor Shifman (2014) narrowed it to the internet form — groups of items sharing content, form, or stance that users create with awareness of one another. What makes memes useful in conflict is that the audience does the labor: a template invites remixing, each remix is an act of affiliation, and the format compresses a frame (the opponent is weak, ridiculous, or dangerous) into something processed before it can be argued with. Jeff Giesea argued in 2015 that states should treat memetic warfare as a discipline; Marwick and Lewis (2017) documented how online subcultures in 2016 ran it without state help, and Zannettou and colleagues (2018) traced how fringe boards seeded memes that mainstream platforms then carried. Irony is the operational advantage: an image can be a joke to one audience and a recruitment signal to another, and a creator can disclaim whatever meaning a critic identifies. The tell is a joke that arrives everywhere at once with the same target.

Real-world examples

•In 2016, users of 4chan, Reddit's r/The_Donald, and allied accounts ran what they called the Great Meme War, producing pro-Trump and anti-Clinton imagery at industrial scale; Pepe the Frog was adopted so heavily by white-nationalist accounts that the Anti-Defamation League listed certain uses as a hate symbol that September.
•The Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash grew to hundreds of thousands of members in the same cycle, and the Internet Research Agency's meme output targeted both sides, with Senate-commissioned analysis finding its Instagram memes among its most engaged content.
•In June 2020, K-pop fan communities coordinated to flood the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag and a Dallas police tip app with fancams, and in 2022 the NAFO community of volunteers used Shiba Inu memes to mock Russian officials and raise money for Ukrainian units; both were organized meme campaigns by non-state actors.
•Hong Kong protesters in 2019 adopted Pepe as a pro-democracy mascot with no knowledge of its American connotations, illustrating that a meme's meaning belongs to whoever is remixing it at the moment.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Political humor and remix culture are legitimate speech, including sharp partisan mockery; the line is crossed when a meme campaign conceals its sponsor, fabricates the words or events it depicts, or uses irony to deliver a message to one audience while denying it to another.

●Making and sharing political memes is ordinary speech; running a meme campaign while concealing its sponsor or fabricating the events it depicts is not.
●A creator who uses irony to reach an extremist audience while disclaiming the message to everyone else is responsible for both readings.
●Memes that target private individuals, or that fabricate quotations and images, cause the same harm as any other defamation and should be judged the same way.

How to defend against it

►Ask what claim the meme makes when stated in plain words, then evaluate that claim as you would a sentence; the format is designed to be processed before the claim is noticed.
►Trace the template: reverse-image-search the image and check Know Your Meme or a similar archive for its origin and earlier uses, which often reveals the community that seeded it.
►Notice synchronized arrival — the same joke, target, and format appearing across many accounts within hours is a campaign signature, whichever side it serves.
►Apply the accuracy prompt before resharing: pause and ask whether the meme's underlying claim is true, a check that Pennycook and Rand found reduces sharing of falsehoods.
►Treat irony as a claim, not a shield — when a meme is defended as just a joke, ask what the audience that took it seriously was told.

From the Defense Playbook

The Accuracy Promptseconds

Before sharing anything, ask yourself one question, "Is this accurate?", because most sharing of false content comes not from belief but from inattention to accuracy, and the question alone measurably improves what people pass on.

Reverse Image Searchminutes

Upload or paste an image (or a video frame) into an image search engine to find where else and when it has appeared, which exposes recycled photos, stolen profile pictures, and images given a false caption.

Do Not Repeat the Myth in the Headlineminutes

When you correct a falsehood, put the true statement in the headline, subject line, first sentence, and image, and keep the false claim out of those positions, because most of the audience will see only that part and will carry away whatever it says.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press
The definition of internet memes as participatory, remixable items created with awareness of one another.
Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute · link
How 2016 online subcultures organized meme production and used irony to reach multiple audiences.
Zannettou, S., Caulfield, T., Blackburn, J., De Cristofaro, E., Sirivianos, M., Stringhini, G., & Suarez-Tangil, G. (2018). On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018)
Measurement of how fringe communities seeded memes that spread to mainstream platforms.
Giesea, J. (2015). It's Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare. Defence Strategic Communications, 1(1), NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
The argument that memes should be treated as an instrument of state strategic communication.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press
The original coinage of meme as a unit of cultural replication.

Last reviewed 2026-09-07

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