This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Alyvia Walters, Rutgers University, USA; (2) Tawfiq Ammaris, Rutgers University, USA; (3) Kiran Garimella, Rutgers University, USA; (4) Shagun Jhaver, Rutgers University, USA. Table of Links Abstract & Introduction Background and Related Work Methods The Tools of CRT Meme Production Knowledge Production in a Post-Truth World Conclusion & References Conclusion This study entices us to continue asking how we might confront mis-/disinformation in our current moment. It becomes especially urgent as we encounter the fact that much of the information circulating through highly transmissible media, such as memes, is not only incorrect but is also fungible: in the case of CRT-centered memes, CRT could “mean” almost anything race-related to forward each camp’s agenda, and seemingly very few care to engage with an institutional definition. When politicized definitions are a practice in power assertion, the discursive work these definitions do–“correct” or not–is more necessary than ever to understand. As Cassam (2021) warns us, it is important not to mistake a lack of engagement with “true” definitions as a disregard for the truth as a whole, and assuming that mis- /disinformation is merely bullshit is perhaps an unproductive lens through which to view knowledge production. We must take these definitions seriously, as they are, from a political epistemology stance, thoughtfully crafted messages that are “true” in some way to their consumers. There are several fruitful routes that we can identify for further work around the production and consumption of these memes as they relate to knowledge-building practices. In the space of production, contacting those who created these media objects would potentially lend useful insight about how they, as creators, gained their own understanding of CRT, and why they chose to disseminate this information in these particular ways attached to these particular visual formats. The Media Research Center would be an interesting first place to start, as they crafted each of their anti-CRT memes in the same aesthetic format with the same rhetorical appeals to Black spokespeople. Additionally, study of those who consume these memes is warranted to uncover how users’ encounters with these media shape their understandings of CRT and their opinions on it. Further, we argue that platforms, too, have some responsibility to contextualize memes such as these through content moderation practices. We acknowledge that this is more than a simple technical issue: filters for racist material, for example, would not flag memes as nuanced as these, and indeed, platforms would likely encounter bad publicity around censorship if any of the memes included in this study were removed. However, there are ways to approach this information landscape through socio-technical solutions, such as by providing the public, experts, and other cultural gatekeepers the ability to contextualize information on social networking sites (Morrow et al. 2022). By adding “notes,” or otherwise interacting with the information in such a way that its complex relationships to institutional fact are immediately evident to users who may encounter that information, platforms could greatly diminish the power of partisan information masquerading as fact. Finally, educational curricula and the students who learn from them would deeply benefit from incorporating critical media consumption practices into their core goals and outcomes. It is no longer possible to separate learning from media consumption in the everyday lives of the vast majority of students in the U.S., and we all suffer when there is a lack of commitment to creating critical media consumers who are trained to think before believing–and even more importantly, re-circulating–a politicized meme. Training young people on how mis-/disinformation and hate speech are disguised as fact and/or humor in memes is an important step forward in strengthening our information landscape and democratic future. Teachers are extraordinarily overburdened already, but a curriculum that integrates media literacy as a guiding principle would partially shift the burden from teachers directly and instead task those who guide the direction of school districts nationwide with creating pathways to teach this skill in all subject areas. There is no simple solution to curtailing the circulation of harmful visual media, as it is neither a purely tech issue nor purely a lack of education: this is a social issue which can only be resolved through the engagement of a wide variety of actors. It is incumbent upon all of us to take these seemingly insignificant memes seriously for their social impact and what they reveal about current ideological trends. It is crucial to better understand how bottom-up knowledge production on politicized topics, such as CRT, occurs on social media, particularly through compact, madeto-share media such as memes. In doing so, we can move beyond a deterministic conception of post-truth politics which generalizes disregard for truth, and instead interrogate the construction of politicized “truth” as a sustained process of thoughtful rhetorical decision-making with real-world effects. References Askanius T (2021) Memes and media’s role in radicalization. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare 4(2): 115–121. DOI:10.21810/jicw.v4i2.3753. Barakat M and Rankin S (2022) Youngkin looks to root out critical race theory in virginia. URL https://apnews.com/article/education-richmondrace-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-virginia8ad5da65b9cb05265f2b8081c41827cd. Beauchamp Z (2021) Did critical race theory really swing the virginia election? URL https://www.vox.com/policy-andpolitics/2021/11/4/22761168/virginia-governorglenn-youngkin-critical-race-theory. Bonilla-Silva E (1997) Rethinking racism: Toward a structural interpretation. American Sociological Review 62(3): 465–480. DOI:10.2307/2657316. Burroughs B (2020) Fake memetics: Political rhetoric and circulation in political campaigns. The MIT Press. Carney N (2016) All lives matter, but so does race. Humanity & Society 40(2): 180–199. DOI:10.1177/0160597616643868. Cassam Q (2021) Bullshit, Post-Truth, and Propaganda. Oxford University Press. Cestone LM, Jones LV, Harris M, Quezada N and Roest-Gyimah N (2022) Black americans’ social emotional responses to race-related discriminatory content on social media. Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work : 1–12DOI: 10.1080/15313204.2022.2137716. Cox K (2022) 10 facts about black republicans. URL https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/ 11/07/10-facts-about-black-republicans/. CrowdTangle T (2022) Crowdtangle. facebook, menlo park, california, US. list id: 1733230. https://crowdtangle.com/ . Dean J (2018) Sorted for memes and gifs: Visual media and everyday digital politics. Political Studies Review 17(3): 255–266. DOI: 10.1177/1478929918807483 Delgado R and Stefancic J (2023) Critical race theory an introduction. New York University Press. Edenberg E and Hannon M (2021) Political epistemology. Oxford University Press. Entman RM and Rojecki A (2007) The black image in the white mind: Media and race in America. University of Chicago Press. Ester M, Kriegel HP, Sander J and Xu X (1996) A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD’96. AAAI Press, p. 226–231. Fairclough N (2018) Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge. Farid H (2021) An overview of perceptual hashing. Journal of Online Trust and Safety 1(1). Ferguson A (2022) Redefining antiracism: Learning from activists to sharpen academic language. Sociology Compass 17(1). DOI: 10.1111/soc4.13057. Gantt Shafer J (2017) Donald trump’s “political incorrectness”: Neoliberalism as frontstage racism on social media. Social Media + Society 3(3): 205630511773322. DOI:10.1177/ 2056305117733226. Lankshear C and Knobel M (2019) Memes, macros, meaning, and menace: Some trends in internet memes. The Journal of Communication and Media Studies 4(4): 43–57. DOI: 10.18848/2470-9247/cgp/v04i04/43-57. Lee-Won RJ, White TN and Potocki B (2017) The black catalyst to tweet: The role of discrimination experience, group identification, and racial agency in black americans’ instrumental use of twitter. Information, Communication & Society 21(8): 1097–1115. DOI:10.1080/1369118x.2017.1301516. Lewis AK (2005) Black conservatism in america. Journal of African American Studies 8(4): 3–13. DOI:10.1007/s12111-005-1000- 1. Low J (2019) A pragmatic definition of the concept of theoretical saturation. Sociological Focus 52(2): 131–139. DOI:10.1080/ 00380237.2018.1544514. Matamoros-Fernández A (2017) Platformed racism: The mediation and circulation of an australian race-based controversy on twitter, facebook and youtube. Information, Communication & Society 20(6): 930–946. DOI:10.1080/1369118x.2017.1293130. McIntyre L (2018) Post-truth. MIT Press. Mendelberg T (2001) The race card: Campaign strategy, implicit messages, and the norm of Equality. Princeton University Press. Monga V and Evans B (2006) Perceptual image hashing via feature points: Performance evaluation and tradeoffs. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 15(11): 3452–3465. DOI: 10.1109/TIP.2006.881948. Moody-Ramirez M, Tait GB and Bland D (2021) An analysis of George Floyd-themed memes. The Journal of Social Media in Society 10(2): 373–401. Morrow G, Swire-Thompson B, Polny JM, Kopec M and Wihbey JP (2022) The emerging science of content labeling: Contextualizing social media content moderation. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 73(10): 1365–1386. DOI:10.1002/asi.24637. Nieubuurt JT (2021) Internet memes: Leaflet propaganda of the digital age. Frontiers in Communication 5. DOI:10.3389/ fcomm.2020.547065. Noble SU (2018) Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. Ray R, Brown M, Fraistat N and Summers E (2017) Ferguson and the death of michael brown on twitter: #blacklivesmatter, #tcot, and the evolution of collective identities. Ethnic and Racial Studies 40(11): 1797–1813. DOI:10.1080/01419870.2017.1335422. Rietdijk N and Archer A (2021) Post-truth, false balance and virtuous gatekeeping. In: Snow N and Vaccarezza MS (eds.) Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media: Ethical and Epistemic Issues. Routledge. Rose J (2017) Brexit, trump, and post-truth politics. Public Integrity 19(6): 555–558. DOI:10.1080/10999922.2017.1285540. Ross AS and Rivers DJ (2018) Internet memes as polyvocal political participation. In: Schill DJ and Hendricks JA (eds.) The presidency and social media: Discourse, disruption, and digital democracy in the 2016 presidential election. Routledge. Schaffner BF, Macwilliams M and Nteta T (2018) Understanding white polarization in the 2016 vote for president: The sobering role of racism and sexism. Political Science Quarterly 133(1): 9–34. DOI:10.1002/polq.12737. Shifman L (2013) Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18(3): 362–377. DOI:10.1111/jcc4.12013. West C (1996) Foreward. In: Crenshaw K, Gotanda N and Peller G (eds.) Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. Woods HS and Hahner LA (2020) Make America meme again the rhetoric of the alt-right. Peter Lang Publishing Inc. New York. Zannettou S, Caulfield T, Blackburn J, Cristofaro ED, Sirivianos M, Stringhini G and Suarez-Tangil G (2018) On the origins of memes by means of fringe web communities. Zheng L (2021) It’s not your coworkers’ job to teach you about social issues. URL https://hbr.org/2019/07/its-not-yourcoworkers-job-to-teach-you-about-social-issues.

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: The Tools of CRT Meme Production

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Conclusion & References

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Advancements in Memes Analysis: Scene Graphs and Multimodal Approaches

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Abstract & Intro

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Methods

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Background and Related Work

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Knowledge Production in a Post-Truth World

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: The Tools of CRT Meme Production

Advancements in Memes Analysis: Scene Graphs and Multimodal Approaches

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Abstract & Intro

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Methods

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Background and Related Work

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Knowledge Production in a Post-Truth World

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: The Tools of CRT Meme Production

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Minty

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps