When I opened Instagram after President Trump’s inauguration in January and saw memes making light of Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, I was disgusted. Americans were joking in the comments as if the post were funny, ignoring its serious implications for society. Political memes have clearly gotten out of hand.
Politics is what shapes our country; politicians make decisions that affect millions of people on a daily basis. From choices to place tariffs on foreign goods, to sending the National Guard into major cities, everything that the government does has an impact on the lives of Americans.
The creation of and focus on political memes undermines the significance of governmental actions, and makes fun of things that are truly not funny. Politics must be taken more seriously.
According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), political memes remove the nuance from complex political topics, leading to the creation of assumptions and false narratives about major events, both positive and negative.
Only around 37% of American adults, according to Pew Research Center, actually read, listen to or watch the news, which is a much more credible way of gaining information, in particular about nuanced politics.
Omitting key details about national events in political memes prevents people from being properly informed. Over half of adults in the U.S. sometimes get their news from social media, according to the Pew Research Center, meaning that these small collections of information that has been curated specifically to be funny is all that they are exposed to.
Additionally, the NIH states that memes can be used to make extreme content about governmental actions, more palatable to all audiences, which can greatly minimize the large-scale negative events that must be acknowledged.
The issue in this situation is not just the memes: it is that many U.S. citizens only learn about major political events from short and undetailed posts on social media. These memes are made to poke fun at serious topics rather than actually acknowledging the effect that these events can have on the U.S. population.
It is crucial to acknowledge that politics are not something to be taken lightly. Each day hundreds, if not thousands of jokes are posted on social media to make people amused about unfortunate political situations. It may feel easier to cope with what is going on in the current political atmosphere through humor, but ultimately it is more important to educate ourselves if any change is going to be made.
Despite how funny the memes may be, it is more important to take the time to truly understand political occurrences by reading the news rather than dismissing their relevance in the real world.
