How absurdist memes turned into war propaganda

When Donald Trump wants to update the world on the status of the war with Iran, he occasionally reaches for a meme. Like many memes, these are absurd. In one, an AI-generated US Navy ship shoots down an Iranian drone with the words, “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!” (Does a laser make a bing sound?) In a recent meme spree, one that included references to a three-year-old Bud Light boycott for no apparent reason, Trump posted AI images of Iranian oil tankers being blown up, one day after the Pentagon paused strikes.

More than a third of Americans now get their news mainly from social media, according to the Reuters Institute, and the country’s oldest-ever president is also its most terminally online. Chaotic, crude internet jokes have become official US political commentary. That in turn has prompted the country’s enemies to engage with a strange new battlefield.

Trump is not the only one posting memes. If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the first TikTok war, then the Iran conflict is the first meme war. While Trump is on Truth Social, official Iranian accounts have embarked on their own trolling campaign via X. The Iranian embassy in Zimbabwe joked that it had lost the keys to the Strait of Hormuz and posted a creepy AI image of a zombified Jeffrey Epstein smiling at the destruction of Iranian hospitals. The Iranian embassy in South Africa posted a strange, AI-generated video of Trump singing about blockades.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue calls this “shitposting as statecraft”. Iran is using provocative, low-quality images and videos to try to present itself as the witty, self-aware underdog. It has been rewarded with a huge engagement boost. This sort of posting, says the ISD, could become a blueprint for non-traditional war propaganda in future conflicts.

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Think of memes in relation to the Greek word mimema — imitation — and these tactics make some sense. Memes are catchy ideas designed to be repeated and spread online. They can be a word or phrase but are likely to be pictures or videos, with simple, easy-to-read text and over-the-top images. They are shareable and (mostly) authorless. As Art in America magazine once wrote, memes are “open work” — a collective endeavour. Not only are they easy to make, but their format benefits from repetition. It’s not stealing to put your own spin on the distracted boyfriend meme or the “this is fine” dog meme — that’s what they were made for.

Most importantly, memes are often jokes. So when Trump posts ones that compare him to a king, a fighter pilot or Jesus, he may well like the heroic way the pictures look, but he is also baiting his opponents to take them seriously and seem like crybabies who can’t take a joke.

You have to go back to the late 1980s to understand how this came about. Mike Godwin, then a law student in Texas, is credited with being the first to describe internet memes. As someone who spent a lot of time on online message boards, he wanted to find a way to undermine the annoying arguments that erupted between strangers. His solution was to create something he called Godwin’s Law: the maxim that any discussion on the internet will eventually lead to someone being compared to the Nazis or Hitler.

Godwin, who now works as a technology lawyer in Washington, says he used that pseudo-scientific-sounding term to puncture self-serious commentators, and then seeded the idea into online conversations. “I had been reading a lot about information theory and the idea of information as something that is integrated into the physical world,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t say something earnest about [the arguments] — that would lead to ridicule — so I came up with this idea, this joke, and let it propagate.”

In his essay “Meme, Counter-meme”, published in Wired in 1994, Godwin described what he did as “memetic engineering”. He drew on the idea of memes that British biologist Richard Dawkins introduced in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene — “units of cultural transmission” that could spread and evolve culture by non-genetic means. While Dawkins was talking about fashion or recipes, Godwin’s online meme was a phrase designed to stop bad-faith arguments.

Online memes tended to have a few distinct characteristics, one of which was that the butt of the joke was often the person posting it. The smooth, grey-headed “stonks” guy, for example, was a symbol of financial failure. In “rage comics” and “image macros” (pictures with text on top) creators and re-posters poked fun at themselves for being embarrassed or exasperated by life. As time went on, jokes were sometimes piled on top of one another in a way that could make the memes unintelligible to the casual observer.

As memes have been adopted for commercial purposes or political commentary, the target of the joke has shifted outwards. And once a meme is out in the world its creator has no say over how it is used. Pepe the Frog, loved by the alt-right, was originally drawn by San Francisco cartoonist Matt Furie, who is generally described as “gentle”. Furie sued the Infowars website for using Pepe in a poster that featured its far-right conspiracy theorist founder Alex Jones and was awarded a $15,000 settlement (he said he would give the money to a frog charity). But he has not managed to stop Pepe being used in racist, antisemitic memes — nor will he.

At the same time, the density of memetic information has eroded. When the co-founder of defence tech start-up Anduril Industries posts an image of an alligator dunking a basketball, there is not much nuance to grasp. Messages intended for a broad audience sometimes require little interpretation.

The more that memes are employed for war propaganda, the emptier the meaning and the flatter the jokes will fall. Once it might have been worth asking whether the “bing” in Trump’s laser meme was a reference to something else — maybe an old internet joke about Super Mario fans being annoying, or the fact that Trump was once recorded using the word “bing” over 50 times. Knowing that could have unlocked another layer of meaning. Now it doesn’t matter. Online memes began with an attempt to puncture self-serious commentators. But what is there to puncture when the subject matter is this serious?

To Godwin, the current wartime insults and boasts are very far from what he imagined memes should be. “My idea for memes was something that would trigger people to think,” he says. “What this is is more like a substitute for thought.”

Elaine Moore is the FT tech comment editor

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