Meme Hygiene

How To Not Spread Hate

- Clive Thompson

BACK IN THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SEASON, reporters on the tech and politics beats began noticing a rise in far-right memes that supported Trump. Memes being memes, these seemed initially like weird, off-color jokes. They wondered: What the hell is going on? Was this shit posting ironic or serious? Or both? Either way, it seemed newsworthy. The memes were climbing the trending lists on every social network and landing on the front page of Reddit. So journalists began filing what became a flood of stories about alt-right political memes and loopy conspiracy theories. Like Taylor Swift as a white nationalist icon and Pepe the Frog in a Nazi uniform.

“Surely if we expose this,” one tech journalist told herself, “it’ll put people off it.”

It didn’t. When, a year later, Trump had won and Nazis were openly marching, those reporters began to realize that their coverage had had precisely the opposite effect. It had helped bring white supremacy into the mainstream by giving it crucial exposure. They had wildly amplified the importance and reach of what were, in all likelihood, a not huge number of miscreants.“Every once in a while I’ll look back and see something that I wrote a year and a half ago and the pit of my stomach falls,” one reporter says.

Hate groups had gamed the media. They did it energetically and successfully. Now it may be time to invoke the wisdom of WarGames— where the only way to win is not to play.