WASHINGTON — Whether it’s a grinning Joe Biden as “Dark Brandon” or Donald Trump’s face superimposed onto a scene from HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” both presidential campaigns this year have embraced digital memes, the lingua franca of social media.
President Joe Biden puts on sunglasses after making a joke about becoming the “Dark Brandon” persona during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton on April 29, 2023, in Washington.
The campaigns of the Democratic president and Republican former president enthusiastically create and share content trying to shape the narratives around both men. Biden’s campaign even recently posted a job seeking a manager of meme pages.
With tens of millions of people using social media as a primary information source, the battle of memes could affect who wins in November. Many Americans say they’re not excited about a Biden-Trump rematch and growing digital habits make it harder to reach people through traditional spaces for political advertising like print publications or television.
Memes can be an edgier, faster way to get a political point across than a block of text or a lengthy video. But online misfires have hurt candidates and created major controversies.
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Here’s a look at how memes are shaping 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 a piece of information that is imitated and shared, be it a slogan, a behavior, an idea.
With the rise of internet culture, digital memes have skyrocketed in popularity. They often take the form of visual content like an image or a video with some kind of message that speaks to people who get it because of some knowledge they have or membership in a particular group. Memes don’t have to be funny or satirical, but that makes them more likely to be shared widely. And while politicians these days work to deliberately create and share memes, some of the most well-known ones were unintentionally sparked.
One of the earliest memes of the modern era was former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s enthusiastic scream the night of the Iowa caucuses, with videos and images…
