How social media shapes our political memory

With Donald Trump's return to the White House, I've been reminded of a viral social media moment from just before his first rise to power in 2016.

- Chelsea Butkowski

After waiting in line to vote that year, nearly 12,000 people joined a second queue, at a cemetery in upstate New York, to visit the grave of famed women's suffragist Susan B Anthony and place their "I Voted" stickers on her headstone.

The event keyed into a recurring theme of women's rights in Clinton's campaign and quickly garnered national media attention. An unplanned Facebook livestream by a local news station accrued over 7 million views in a matter of hours. The livestream captivated me: people reinterpreting and repurposing campaign rhetoric in real time, based on their own personal histories and identities. It reflected a potent cultural force.

Today, presidential discourse online is increasingly shaped not by politicians themselves, but by everyday people. Through social media, Americans project our own ideas onto the nation's political future, which are always rooted in our contested perspectives on its past.

Institutions and individuals interpret political contests in ways that are deeply informed by memory work, how people revise accounts of the past to serve present-day narrative needs. People do memory work when they create media adaptations of historic events - from Shakespeare to Hamilton; build monuments to honour historical figures; or even just tell our day-to-day, personal stories. Memory work has the power to perpetuate present visions of history into the future. Sometimes this means overemphasising or obscuring some aspects of the original events.