Election 2024: how Biden and Trump face off on the Internet

WASHINGTON (AP) Whether it's a smiling Joe Biden as Dark Brandon or Donald Trump's face superimposed on a scene from HBO's Game of Thrones, both presidential campaigns this year have embraced memes digital, the lingua franca of social media.

The campaigns of both the Democratic president and the former Republican president are enthusiastically creating and sharing content trying to shape the narratives around both men. The Bidens campaign even recently posted a job seeking a meme page manager.

With tens of millions of people using social media as their primary source of information, the battle of memes could determine who wins in November. Many Americans say they are not excited about a rematch between Biden and Trump and that growing digital habits make it harder to reach people through traditional political advertising spaces like print publications or television.

Memes can be a bolder, faster way to get a political message across than a block of text or a long video. But the online hiccups hurt the candidates and created major controversies.

Here's a look at how memes shape presidential politics.

First: what is a meme?

Memes have been around longer than you think.

The term meme was coined in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who used it to refer to information that was imitated and shared, whether it was a slogan, a behavior, or an idea.

What you need to know about the 2024 elections

With the rise of internet culture, the popularity of digital memes has exploded. They often take the form of visual content like an image or video with some sort of message that speaks to the people who receive it because of some knowledge they possess or their membership in a particular group. Memes don't have to be funny or satirical, but this makes them more likely to be shared widely. And while politicians today go out of their way to deliberately create and share memes, some of the most well-known ones were triggered unintentionally.

One of the first memes of the modern era was former Vermont Governor Howard Dean's enthusiastic scream on the night of the Iowa caucuses, with videos and images of the Democrats' guttural scream widely shared , attracting ridicule and harming his already struggling presidential candidacy.

When President Barack Obama moved into the White House in 2009, photos of outgoing President George W. Bush with the text “Do I still miss him?” were widely shared by Bush supporters.

A 2011 photo of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wearing sunglasses and looking at her phone became a popular meme the following year, Texts from Hillary, purporting to show her sending sarcastic text messages to people. politicians and celebrities.

If you do it well, you exploit something that the group agrees on or that arouses suspicion; you're tapping into something that connects with the audience, said Rebecca Ortiz, an associate professor of advertising at Syracuse University who has studied the influence of memes on political identity.

How do the two candidates approach memes?

The Bidens campaign created its own stockpile of photos and videos to distribute to official accounts linked to Biden. According to a Biden campaign official, advisors are also looking to partner with third-party creators in the coming months, hoping to reach users who already seem aligned with a pro-Biden message.

By developing relationships with outside creators, campaign officials hope that some undecided or unconvinced voters will pick up on Biden's message if they receive it from another account they already follow.

We really strive to run a digital program that is authentic to our candidate, who probably doesn't spend all their time on Twitter in fact, that's definitely not the case, said Clarke Humphrey, senior digital persuasion advisor for the Biden campaign. So I think we've been very creative about how to tap into all the corners of the Internet so that it can be where it needs to be without it necessarily having to go to those places.

Trump, a prolific user of social media even before running for president, has long embraced memes and shared them, as have his very online political aides and some of his adult children. His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., frequently shares them and presents himself on Instagram as a Meme Wars General.

The campaign provided no details about its digital team or its use of memes. Spokesman Steven Cheung issued a statement calling out Biden's videotaped speech errors and moments of apparent confusion.

Joe Biden is a walking, talking meme every time he introduces himself to the public, Cheung said.

What are some examples of their content?

Biden's team embraced Dark Brandon, reappropriating a right-wing conspiracy meme that portrayed the president as a menacing force and used a nickname, Brandon, that became a joke among conservatives for insulting him.

While Dark Brandon originally portrayed Biden as a shadowy threat, Democrats embraced it, using the image as a meme to mock conspiracy theories about Biden's alleged influence on events like the Super Bowl and describing him as a powerful force to tout his achievements.

Now the campaign is selling signs, mugs, baby onesies and even coffee bags depicting Biden as Dark Brandon with red laser eyes.

Trump and his team regularly share memes that glorify him in exaggerated ways, such as depicting him leading a group of dancing Bollywood soldiers.

In April, just before the total solar eclipse swept across North America, Trump shared a meme video on his Truth social media account that featured clips of people looking up at the sky wearing eclipse glasses and then clapping as the sky darkened, before switching to an image. of the sun with a large silhouette of Trump's head blocking it while people applaud.

And the Biden and Trump campaigns quickly filmed potentially embarrassing videos of their opponent and posted them online within minutes, injecting these moments into the social media bloodstream and often fueling mainstream media coverage.

When did memes go bad?

Trump and his campaign often share content created by outside meme creators, often aimed at his base supporters, and sometimes disavow content that later sparks outrage.

In 2016, when he shared a meme about Clinton that appeared to depict the Star of David atop a pile of money, evoking an anti-Semitic trope. Trump deleted the image but called it a basic star, often used by sheriffs.

Last month, Trump sparked backlash by sharing a video meme on Truth Social that included references to a unified Reich among hypothetical headlines if he won the election in November.

The United Reich meme was created by an outside group of meme creators who, according to the New York Times, collaborated with the Trump campaign. The Dilley Meme Team describes themselves as America's biggest MAGA members and Trumps Online War Machine with their creations sometimes shared by Trump himself.

The campaign said the video was shared by a staffer who saw it online and did not see the reference. The Trump campaign denied any coordination with the group, but said it appreciated the efforts of outside creators.

Brenden Dilley, who leads the Dilley Meme Team, did not respond to emailed questions about the group's work, but posted a response on X saying he would do an interview in January 2025, after the next inauguration presidential.

Which memes go the furthest?

It's hard to say. Both candidates have tens of millions of followers on social media, as do their campaign accounts, but it's difficult to track the number of times a particular meme is shared, or remixed and shared again.

Trump has more social media followers than Biden on Instagram, TikTok, Truth Social (Trump's social network), and the site, then known as Twitter, was locked after January 1. .6 insurrection.

Trump's only message since then was to release his mugshot. It also became a meme.

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