 All right. It is 101 Eastern, and that means it is time for Vision, a live weekly show peering into the trends, ideas and disruptions affecting the future of our democracy. As always, we will be here at 1 o'clock Eastern on Thursdays, and this episode and every episode will be available at kf.org slash vision. Why do we do the show at 101? Well, that is actually the legally mandated time for you all to download Zoom security patches. We don't actually have a relationship with Zoom, although we would welcome that. We could debut their new tagline Zoom. We weren't built for this, but that is probably something to come. So welcome to the show. If this is your first time, we're glad to have you with us. If you were here last week, we're delighted to continue the conversation with you. What we're doing in this show is we're looking at the kind of huge topics that are potentially changing the way our democracy will look in the near future, in the distant future. Ideas that you might just be catching a glimpse of when you read the newspaper, when you look around your community or in your field, and we'll try to give you some depth. We'll try to give you insight that's harder to find in other places. So we've begun the show with sort of a multi-part series that's really focused on the infodemic. The infodemic is this now formally recognized, challenged, facing our world in association with the COVID-19 pandemic. And it's the idea that there is this overabundance, the World Health Organization calls it, this overabundance of information about what's going on, about how to stay safe. That's making it incredibly difficult for people to figure out what information they can trust, who they can trust, where they can go in order to stay safe. And we think that not only is this a critical challenge for our democracy today, it really points to potential vulnerabilities that our democracy will have to continue with for a long time to come. In just a few minutes, we're going to get started with today's guest, Joan Donovan, who's the director of the technology and social change research project at the Shorenstein Center. Joan is an incredible researcher focusing on how information and misinformation spreads through the internet, the way communities associate in the internet. And we're going to be talking about a kind of fun topic, turn chilling, which is the topic of memes. And let's see, for those of you who might be less familiar, let's see if we can bring up a picture of kind of a common meme. This is a new feature for us to try to bring this up on the screen. So memes are, you know, I come from sort of the dark ages of the internet when you still kind of had like wind your computer to go online. And memes are, you know, clever images or videos that can be deployed in a lot of, in a lot of contexts. And, you know, certain early days of memes, these were sort of fun things that people that people would do. And what we'll talk about with Joan is the ways that memes are being deployed to transmit other, other kinds of information. Before we do get into the show, there's just one, there's, there was a really big controversy from last week. And we could take the, take the meme. There was one, one controversy from last week that I really want to address, which is the microphone. You know, we heard from a lot of you about this microphone, you know, some of you hated it. Others of you didn't like it. We think this is, this is Brecht. This is Verite. This is about revealing the means of production. We feel really passionately about the microphone. It's the, it's the safety blanket that tells you this is happening in someone's house. But this is a show about democracy. We want to rehearse that. So we actually want your votes on the microphone. There's a picture of the microphone on our Instagram account, vision.KF. Go to Instagram. Tell us what you think about the microphone. The microphone's not going to take it personally. You know, say, keep it clean. It's a, it's a family Instagram channel. But say what you want. If you love the microphone, we'll let you know. And if you hate the microphone, you'll never hear about it again, but the microphone will stay. So with that, I think we got to get into today's show, which is going to be an incredibly fascinating discussion. So it is, it's not my pleasure. I'd like to ask you all to welcome to the program, Joan Donovan. Welcome. I'm in. I made it past the gates. Yes. And I, I will say this is your first video conference. Okay. Yeah, just the first time getting first time call or long time listener. So yeah, it's a, you know, but I think you should, I think you should switch to a tin can, you know, if you really want that, that true effect. I think we're gonna, I like that. I thought that is, that's really revealing the means. That's the three penny opera. If I'm going to reference, yeah, yeah, that's the para social relationship of, you know, like when we were studying YouTube, one of the things that was interesting was there were these people who were like, obviously raking in million plus a year, but they insisted on having these like bedroom type sets or these sets that looked like, you know, the Wayne's world garage basements. So, but it's all adding to the authenticity of the, of the show and the, and the idea that, you know, there's nothing behind this broadcast. It's all, it's all easy. And I'll tell you, technology's really made it easy. It's come a long way. Well, let's get in it. Let's get into how easy technology has made it in some ways to communicate. So before we get into kind of means in COVID-19, you know, just help us understand like why study memes? Why are memes important on the internet? I think a lot of people have my initial reaction when you say, when you talk about a memes, which is I've seen Rick rolling someone, I've seen a cat with a funny caption one too many times, it does, but it doesn't feel like that's information transmission. So tell us about why memes are important to understanding what's happening on the internet. Yeah, it's, it's a good question. And it's sort of one that we get often because people are like, well, isn't that, you know, low culture isn't, you know, wouldn't it be more important to study how the New York Times is covering elections than these like amorphous clouds of folks online? But for us, culture really comes from and is driven from fringe communities who are often very creative. And so when we think about political communication and how it's going to evolve over the next decade, we've seen the steady intrusion, I guess, of memes in political worlds. And we really felt as a research team, you know, I work with Gabby Lim and Brian Friedberg and Rob Ferris, we really felt that memes at this point, in 2020, we're going to play a role in how people understood candidates. And we also knew that candidates were going to try to, you know, get tricky with the memes and, you know, and play into that in order to capture younger voters, sort of like the ways in which the rock the vote campaigns of your tried to, you know, get younger folks involved. But the other thing that I want to get into that, but I just I was sort of I kind of want to go back a step. I mean, I want to get into that. But why, why are memes an important form of cultural expression on the internet? I mean, I think, I think the principle you outline makes sense, you know, if you go back to the 60s, you know, the counter the fringe counterculture starts with folk music starts with certain variants of rock music. I said, so I think we've seen before forms of cultural transmission that have entertainment affects associated with them. But why what is it about the internet that makes the meme work? I think part of it is the the form itself, right? We've kind of we've stabilized into a meme world of images with what's called the impact font and they're short. They're quippy. If they're done really well, they're they're author lists in a sense, like you don't know where it came from. And you're not trying to push an ideology, but it resonates with you. And one other thing that's interesting about memes is you either get them or you don't. And so scrolling is actually an important part of how memes resonate. So people will scroll past a meme and it might not, you know, make you think ill of the account that has posted the meme. If you don't get it, you're just like, Oh, another piece of content moving along, moving along. But good memes tend to focus on in groups. There's only certain people that get the joke. And I think indie music has the same kind of feel to it where it's like I'm part of a community of people that only know about this ban. And then their author list, they can be really sticky. That is like, they have this quality to them, like a good jingle or, you know, a good piece of advertising that it's hard to forget. And then the last quality is that they promote participation or remix. And in remixing memes, you know, we have these meme templates that often come up. But in remixing them, you can participate in memetic cultures online. And it's a fun way to engage with people in your community, people outside of your community. And really, there's nothing more exciting, I think, for some people that get a meme to go viral. I mean, they get really excited about it. Right. So I'm hearing you say they really they trade on like what makes the internet a great experience. They're they're democratizing and that you get to participate. They're a kind of code or a language they trade on anonymity. They they were they give you the dopamine reward of virality. If you can pull it off. Or should we before we're going to get into some memes that I think are going to be concerning to some people are do our memes endemically harmful? Or is the question how these qualities are being used in your mind? It's definitely about, you know, what it is that's the content of the meme. And, you know, there are different means for all strata of society and all subsets and groups and genres of entertainment. And so I think it's, it's not something where the form is the problem. It's really when certain communities are using them to harass someone or to. We often see like gender trolling or LGBT trolling have a lot of memes in them. And so it's usually when they're used for harassment, there's a problem. So let's so I think let's get into COVID memes and start to make this concrete for people. Let's pull those up on the screen. You sent us some really interesting ones that you've been studying. But before as we bring those up on the screen, I do just want to remind people, you know, we're taking your questions live, use the Q&A panel in a button in your zoom panel. You could tweet hashtag night live. You can use Facebook live, you know, just send us in what you're thinking, what you're asking. We've got our producers are standing by to help to aggregate, aggregate some of the questions that are that are coming up and we'll be sure to answer some of them as we as we go along. So, so why don't you this is a, you know, provocative is kind of an understatement. But why don't you maybe walk us through some of these? What are these memes saying? I'm the scroller who's missing the intent half the time. So, you know, talk to me and on behalf of our audience. I think what the one with Joey from Friends, it says COVID-19 doesn't affect the youngs. And then there's the reaction meme is you're not young anymore. That resonates with people like me who grew up with Friends. Friends also has had a revival through Netflix. And I know a lot of younger generations have been watching it. But there's this idea that, you know, you're forever young for a lot of us, you know, but when you're in your 40s and your 50s, you got to worry about stuff. You got to worry about health stuff. And so, you know, it's just one of those things where it's playing on this, you know, the character of Joey himself is this is this kind of buffoon, right? But lovable, nevertheless. The one below it, I thought was really funny. I'm no expert on COVID-19. But this is the cure. This one was something that I saw very early on. And I had a good laugh based on again, targeting people in my generation who love the cure, right? And also understand why this this might be funny. For other people who've never seen a picture of the cure, they'd see this and just think, I don't I don't even know what this is, right? They don't have any instruments with them. It's sort of not obvious that they're banned. Maybe people think they're, you know, a golf band from, you know, contemporary. But yeah, but I just thought that was cute. And then what's interesting about cat memes, and Ethan Zuckerman's written about the sort of cute cat theory of the Internet, is that if your platform can can support lots and lots of cat pictures and people willing to share things that are intimate in their lives, then your platform can also support political organizing, because there's enough stuff on the platform to run cover for political organizing. So this one in the middle says we need to talk, Karen, why are you in my house so much lately? You know, and it's this cute meme. But then the subtext of this is actually kind of funny because of Karen is the new version of OK Boomer. And Karen is a meme, a name associated with the meme of a woman that is, you know, the type of person that says, let me talk to your manager, you know, to the cashier at Starbucks and things like that. These other ones like, Hey, bro, can you keep it down? My brain cells are vibrating right now. It's this idea that you've been at home for so long. And there's like, you're so in your feels that you can like, you know, you can you can hear yourself breathing. There's been a lot of memes about people trying to eat differently in this time. So this one with the cat eating lettuce, actual footage of me trying to enjoy eating healthy and the cat like, don't make me do this. Yeah, there's just been a lot of people trying to figure out how to cook, how to be at home. There's like there's a whole genre of sourdough bread memes going around right now too. I don't know if you've tried, but everybody's growing sourdough. We've got starter. We've got starter in that. We got starter in that. We are not immune from that. And then the last one I just thought was kind of funny because it was very much a dad joke meme packed into a post apocalyptic TV show, you know, The Walking Dead where the dad says no one in there in article has COVID-19. And the kid goes, dad, don't. He goes, it's because they're isolated. You know, very funny dad joke. And then the kid reacts just like every kid reacts to dad jokes with dad. Please stop. Stop. So this is sort of the this is the Groner territory. So this is the fun territory. This is using the Internet to add levity to a moment of crisis. I don't know if we have if we could bring up some examples maybe of the of the more politically oriented means. Let's talk now about means as a vector of this information of destabilization of division. You know, one of the things that you've really been tracking and I was really struck by this is are the ways that dissident communities around COVID. And I don't necessarily mean that pejoratively, but people who are taking a different view of what we ought to do, how they're using using memes. And by the way, you can find the memes that that Joe is tracking. You can see them at medium.com slash meme or weekly. She's got an incredible weekly newsletter looking at this. So what are those? What are the what are the politically oriented memes that you're that you're really starting to see pop up? What are they? So we've we so we initially before the pandemic had started to dive into the meme wars between Bertie and Biden and Trump and, you know, all of these different groups that were vying for political position. And a lot of the means, like especially the Bloomberg ones, were what we call forced means, that is they're trying to make it happen. And it just wasn't working. You know, it reminds me of the meme from mean girls, which is like stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen, right? So forced meme is is usually usually the reason forced means don't work is because they're attached to an author and they're pushing a particular kind of campaign. But the stuff that we're seeing around the reopened protests is particularly alarming in the sense that we are seeing health misinformation pitted pitted against information about your liberty and your freedom and your right to be outside and gather, you know, your right to assemble essentially is is under duress from stay at home orders. And so we've been tracking and trying to get an understanding of what are the political rationales behind these reopened protests? What are the memes that are undergirding them? And then from there also try to understand where Fauci plays in because there's been a lot of memes about quote unquote fire Fauci and Fauci himself has become a meme in a lot of ways. And so we've been really trying to understand the confluence of how health misinformation is being communicated through these through these political memes. So what do you so here? So we've got an example here. I mean, there's kind of the let my people go off, you know, let my people golf, you know, give me liberty or give me death, not exactly creative or new, you know, massage is essential. You know, what some of the ones I saw in your newsletter that had that kind of cleverness factor I noticed were there were a lot that were like, you know, here's my freedom of movement pass. And it was the Bill of Rights. There was there were a number of variations of, you know, corn, you know, quarantining when people are sick is is health is health care, you know, quarantining when we're well is tyranny, you know, that sort of where are these coming from? What kinds of communities are pushing are pushing these ideas through memes? So the first time I had witnessed in person the meme around the First Amendment is my permit was around the Occupy protests saw those back in 2011. But there is when we look when we scratch the surface and start looking at the groups, they're primarily organizing on Facebook using Facebook events, where they're advertising the Facebook events for the protests are primarily in gun rights groups. And so these are people who are, you know, avowed patriots who see their gun rights under threat. This started that the gun rights group started mobilizing back during, I would say, November, December, when Beto O'Rourke and other Democrat debate during the debates, we're talking about gun rights. We saw it really reach a peek in January with the gun rights protests in Virginia. And then those same people who were mobilized in Virginia and beyond are now shifting into pushing these reopen protests. Some of the reopen protests are completely in cars, right? And they're practicing social distancing, and they're using this operation gridlock language to say, don't get out of your car, don't go stand on the corner, stay in your car and pro in protest with medical restrictions, you know, in place. Other people, though, believe that there is some widespread diabolical conspiracy by the Democrats to crash the economy and usher in socialism. That is dangerous, because those people are not socially distancing, they're not wearing masks, and they're defying any kind of stay at home order. Are we seeing any COVID memes on the left? I mean, a lot of what you've described is sort of right, libertarian right. Is this a bipartisan affair? The means that we're seeing on the left related to COVID tend to be heroizing Fauci and talking about Fauci as the sort of, you know, the next great, shiny thing. They tend to be hyper critical of Trump's response to COVID. There's been some interesting ones around, you know, Trump. There's this one I'm thinking of in particular where it's one of those means that zooms in. And at first, the first mean looks like the coronavirus image, like of the virus itself with all the spores on it. But then when you zoom in, the spores are actually stacked maga hats. And so there are definitely memes on the left that are interesting. But there's also this lore that seems to still hang true about the left not being able to mean just just because of the, you know, the seriousness with which the left takes some social situations. So it sounds like a left advanced misperception. I mean, what's our memes misinformation? I mean, you know, there's certainly some of them are conveying misinformation. Certainly, some people are organizing around ideas that that public health authorities would say are dangerous. On the other hand, you know, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger had, you know, really clever lyrics about anti-war lyrics that were creative, compelling, insightful, catchy, questionably accurate, you know, like the emotion was the thing with something like with certain forms of cultural transmission, we just it's about the emotion. It's not about the content. It sounds like there with memes that, you know, am I hearing you right that you're suggesting we should really treat this as as a kind of misinformation depending on the content. It definitely in some context, we do need to think about means as misinformation or perpetuating disinformation. Sometimes even means that are meant to be ironic if you take them literal do can trick people into believing something that they shouldn't. I would say that the means, especially around conspiracies related to Fauci and Bill Gates are disinformation through and through. We did look quite a bit at means related that were anti WHO, World Health Organization that really dragged in this idea that they were bought and paid for by China, for instance, as spreading misinformation or even what we might just call propaganda and sometimes means can be mistaken for propaganda or cartoon types, type propaganda. So it's it's really means are a vessel for information. And that information can take many different forms. And I would also say that from our perspective, we're looking at not just the content, but the when, when are these means becoming popular and circulated? And that sometimes has to do with the crisis. That's a foot like disease means by and large if there was no pandemic going on would not be resonating with people. And so that the when matters too. Yeah, right. And I think that's true for a lot of cultural transmission, maybe maybe amplified by digital media. I guess let's let's talk for a couple of minutes about solutions. You've you've talked a little bit about how we can start to think about you to extend the metaphor sort of inoculating ourselves against the harmful effects. And I really I'm thinking about the beginning of our conversation. And on the one hand, like I take your point that what met, you know, the content is what matters. The the fact that we can use the attributes of the internet anonymity, ease of transmission, participation for good or for evil is means that the ethical choices of ours. On the other hand, you know, there's a part of me that says like the internet architecture just makes this so easy. It makes the pernicious use of this so easy. Or is this is this is the is this a neutral technology or is this the technology that's non neutral precisely because of its vulnerability to to to being to being used for for ill? How do you how do you think about what the internet's not going to go away? So how do you think about what we ought to do if we if we don't want to lose what makes the internet fun and participatory but also don't want to be more vulnerable in a time of crisis then then then we already are. Yeah, I think that what you're getting at is the heart of it, which is the design of social media itself. Social media has tried to make it easier and easier to spread redundant information, almost like a global copy machine, right, retweet button, share button, even on Facebook now, if you want to share a piece of content to multiple groups, it's like you can do it rapid fire, you can do it very quickly. What that does is it actually advantages those who have resources to employ people to be able to be super spreaders. It also advantages people who have large network following so celebrities, politicians, social people who have made a reputation for themselves as social media influencers. They call on their audiences to use those features to get their messages out there. So in this moment with COVID-19, you know, sometimes I hear people giving recommendations to doctors and public health advocates saying, well, you should just become a social media influencer as if it's easy and as if that's the best use of their time. And so I think it's true that manipulators and people with resources and people with large networks are advantaged by the design of social media as it stands. And in the midst of a public health crisis, these companies need to rethink the design around how to make sure people get medical knowledge and authoritative information that is timely, local, relevant and redundant. And if we don't, then we're going to experience all these information asymmetries. We're going to continue to get, people are going to continue to get infected that otherwise could have been protected. And we're going to suffer the consequences of that over the long term. Is the answer adding friction to the system so the global copy machine slows down? Or is the answer exercising editorial influence? Because I heard a bit of both. I mean, I, you know, putting out authoritative information over a funny meme and asking you to go hug everyone is, is an editorial decision. Do you have a view on that? I think the solution lies not necessarily in a magic bullet, but the solution to me requires every platform company to study how they're being manipulated and then to do everything in their power to reduce those harms. And so we see a company like Pinterest, who has banned pretty much vaccine content, anti-vaxxer content in particular. And the people who primarily use Pinterest are not going to run into that information, but we don't live in a mono platform world. All of us use many platforms at once. And so we also need to advance these policies in unison. My recent piece in MIT Tech Review looks at how content deleted from medium is being reanimated through the web archive. And it's going viral, you know, in ways that it probably wouldn't have if there was a way in which medium could easily communicate to other platforms that this is dangerous content and they've removed it. So we've got a few more minutes. I just wanted to get to around 130, so we'll sign off soon. But first, there's an interesting question from the audience, which is how important is the quality of the design and other production aspects to mean by rallying? By the way, we're assuming you're going to use this knowledge for good, whoever is asking this question. OK, this is a scouts honor kind of moment here. So anyway, what's your answer to that? Other other questions in there, particularly about Corona Chan, which is a personification of this anonymous message forward, which has sort of been the bane of many people's existence for a long time. But also is the haven for mean creation has personified Corona virus in an anime character of a young woman who's holding a bottle of Corona beer and that aside, though, you know, the content doesn't need to be slick. This is this is also something that comes up with deepfakes, which is why we wrote the in Brit Paris wrote this paper on deepfakes and sheepfakes because quality is is doesn't always matter, especially when it comes to memes. If it looks really slick, it might trigger people to think that it's coming from some kind of well resourced an authenticity factor. It's you feel like there's a real human being behind this this clever thing. Yeah. And so we've even seen marketers really try to, you know, like when video editors have that fuzz and the VCR effect to try to make it seem like their content is older than it is, you know, for nostalgia purposes. We've even seen marketers try to age their means like taking multiple screenshots of them in order to degrade the quality. I think I mean, there's another discussion at some time about you know, Alex Bloomberg from give it media, I think said it right, which is there's one thing the Internet hates universally. It's in authenticity. And so I think I think there's something about what feels authentic to people. That is that is in some ways the distorting power of the Internet because because what in some ways is less authentic than anonymous content being facsimile, azillion times. OK, so last last question, and then we'll we'll we'll get out of here. What's the next meme more? What do you where do you think the next meme more is going to hit? Well, we've got a meme more weekly coming out today about the milk tea alliance, which is bubble tea, but it's about, you know, transnational meme wars against authoritarianism and the CCP in particular. But what I'm really placing my time and understanding is really how some of these more savvy meme creators that have made a name for themselves underneath memeing Trump into existence are really starting to generate some interesting pro Trump content for the 2020 election. And so there were a lot of groans when Bernie dropped out from, you know, meme communities where people are saying there's not going to be a meme more, you know, Biden's people don't mean they're not even on the Internet, like they don't even know where to find Biden's people. So but I do see that the meme factories around Trump are really starting to to get creative and get interesting. So we're going to be watching that and we're going to be watching closely for how they weaponize past content about Biden in particular, given the fact that Biden doesn't have a memetic army to to fight to fight back. And so we're going to medic army. Yes, yes. Well, this is this is a really you have taken us, I think, on a fascinating dive into an element that is so central to the Internet and how people communicate. And yet that I think so many of us think is peripheral. If you want to join Joan on the front lines of the meme wars and I recommend you do because it is fascinating. You can sign up for meme war weekly at medium.com slash meme more weekly. You can also tune into the Big If True webinar series that she hosts at Shorenstein and there's a special edition podcast from Big If True available on Google and Stitcher podcast. We'll send this all out after the show with links so you'll be able to to sign up and follow it. We're also not done with the infodemic. We've got some amazing shows on the way. Safia Noble from UCLA is going to join us next week. I think we'll offer great insight into some of what Joan's alluded to the way different communities organize and sometimes are organized against on the Internet. We'll hear from Renee DiResta who will talk about the different foreign actors that are sometimes trying to pass them off themselves off as your clever your clever friend on the Internet. You can always stay up to date at kf.org slash vision. That's where we'll have this episode and all past episodes as well as a preview of episodes to come the upcoming schedule. You can email us vision at kf.org and visit us at instagram at vision.kf. Joan, thank you a lot for being here. We really, really appreciate it. It's been fun. Let's chat again. We'll do everyone please. Please hang on for just 30 seconds after the show to fill out a two question survey. We really want your feedback. And by the way, the opening music today came from Miami singer songwriter Nick County. And we are going to get out of here on another Nick County song. Thanks so much for joining us.