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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 The Tools of CRT Meme Production After iteratively coding each meme, we were left with 21 unique codes which could be subsumed under one or more of the following major rhetorical tactics: 1) struggles over definition, or how the meme makes sense of what critical race theory is; 2) constructing “antiracism,” or the ways in which the meme’s ideologies are coded as definitively not-racist to its intended audience; and 3) appeals to authority, or the ways in which the meme uses people or symbols to appear correct. These strategies, then, appear to be the most salient paths through which both pro- and anti-CRT arguments within these memes are built. Defining CRT With two exceptions, neither the pro- nor anti-CRT memes analyzed appear to be concerned with the “real” critical legal studies definition of critical race theory. Because CRT was not generally circulated within public discourse prior to the early 2020s, as mentioned above, there was a wide berth for political and epistemological work to be done in the construction of this definition in the public consciousness. Our analysis reveals that these memes do just that: while both proand anti-CRT memes provide a technically incorrect definition of what CRT actually is, the politics of sensemaking unfolds within these memes. Their consumers are left with bifurcating definitions of the bounds, risks, and benefits of critical race theory that ultimately serve to re-define the bounds and values of the communities in which these memes circulate. Within pro-CRT memes, the aggregated definition reads something like this: critical race theory means teaching history accurately and not being a racist and/or a Republican. These memes went to far fewer lengths than anti-CRT memes to define what CRT actually is, and relied instead upon defining it against other things: racism, Republicans, and/or the erasure of history. The top-circulated meme in our analysis is a prime example of this. In this meme, artist Jonathan Harris stands alongside his now-viral artwork entitled “Critical Race Theory,” which depicts the literal whitewashing of Black history (Figure 1). While this does nothing to define critical race theory, it certainly defines what it is not: the erasure of America’s violent, racist past. Similarly, image cluster 4 (Figure 2) is a computer-generated text-heavy meme that reads, “Republicans are not afraid of critical race theory. They don’t even know what it is. They’re afraid of theories critical of racists. They know who they are.” The irony, of course, is that this meme also does not indicate a real definition of CRT, or an indication of “knowing what it is”–it simply defines CRT against racists and Republicans, both of which believers in CRT cannot be. In contrast to this strategy, anti-CRT memes often utilize quite specific points of definition. Take, for instance, cluster 22 (Figure 3): In providing a six-point bulleted list, this meme lays out, in no uncertain terms, how its consumers are meant to understand CRT. These definitional strategies, however, are not always so concrete as a bulleted list. Whereas proCRT memes defined CRT against other ideas, anti-CRT memes sometimes worked to define it by conflating it with other “anti-American” ideas, such as Marxism (Figure 4) and straying from Christianity (Figure 5). In other words, antiCRT memes often tied CRT to other “woke” ideologies in order to define it, even as “wokeness,” in and of itself, lacks definitive boundaries. In all, anti-CRT memes essentially define critical race theory in the following way: CRT is a racist idea that makes people believe that race matters more than it should, and it is yet another way that “wokeness” is destroying America. This conceptualization is starkly different than that of the pro-CRT memes, and both are far from the “real” legal studies definition, as outlined above. As such, there is obvious political struggle in the fight to win the hegemonic, accepted definition of critical race theory — a definition which has little to do with its origins in critical theory and law. In this discussion on the political struggle over defining CRT, one particularly interesting meme to highlight is that of Cluster 27 (Figure 6). Metadiscourse on the Stakes of Defining CRT In this meme, a screenshot of a quoted tweet, two people are explicitly naming this struggle and pointing to its risks. By indicating that The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank known for their right-wing ideologies, is a top hit in searching for information on critical race theory, the original tweet author is pointing out that knowledge acquisition via the internet is deeply politicized, and without careful, critical consumption habits, people can be easily misled by seemingly authoritative information. The quote tweet, agreeing with this view, further interpolates into an ongoing debate in U.S. culture on whose “job” it is to educate on topics surrounding race and racism: people of color, who are exhausted by confronting this responsibility every day, but are also the people who have actual experience with racism; or white people, who are the ones who should be expending energy into acquiring knowledge to better educate themselves, without needing to further exploit the time and energy of people of color to do so (see, for example, Zheng (2021)). Both Twitter users, “naima, an improvisation,” and “Ramy” land in the same place: passing this responsibility to educate over to the internet is dangerous territory in a politicized information environment. If “some reactionary think tank” such as The Heritage Foundation is where people are gaining their knowledge because “Google is free” and no one else is providing this information, the struggle over defining these words–words which have actual policy impact, as seen through Youngkin’s Executive Order 1–is of utmost importance, and it appears that memes are one avenue in which this epistemological struggle occurs. Defining “Antiracism” These pro- and anti-CRT battles over definition, and the recognition in the metadiscourse that this is, indeed, a battle, is almost exclusively fought on the same grounds: that of antiracism. While there are some other nods to bigotry in its various forms, for example, transphobia as displayed in Figure 5, race and racism are unsurprisingly the main sites upon which definitions of critical race theory and its risks and/or benefits, are built. However, in a similar fashion to how “critical race theory” was defined to meet community needs rather than to reflect a “real” definition of the term, “antiracism,” too, is made into a fungible ideal constructed to meet the dire need of both sides of this argument to appear not-racist: a near necessity in 2023 America. According to Ferguson (2022), antiracism has suffered from a lack of coherent and accessible academic definition. Thus, she proposes a paraphrase of Black author and activist Ijeoma Oluo’s tweeted definition: “the commitment to eradicate racism in all its forms,” with a noted special interest in recognizing the difference between systemic and interpersonal racism. However, the tension we encounter in the analysis of these images is that, under this definition, both overt racism and a quieter “not-racism,” a term we will more clearly define below, is easily able to masquerade as antiracism to the undiscerning eye. In this way, the memes’ constructed definitions of antiracism become a technology through which racism is perpetuated. Bonilla-Silva (1997)’s oft-cited definition of racism demands recognition of both structural and interpersonal forms of racism, and it also demands acknowledgment of the difference between the two. Because these pro-CRT memes often fail to address structural racism, they fall short of forwarding truly antiracist ideologies even as they consistently present themselves as performing antiracism. These failures come through in what we are deeming “not-racism,” or essentially a focus on the interpersonal aspects of racism only, rather than on the structural ones. For instance, in Cluster 4 (Figure 2), the deflective “they” indicates several things all at once: first, that “we,” those who identify with this meme, are not like “them,” the racist Republicans; and second, that the stakes of this argument on critical race theory reside at the individual, interpersonal level. Each of these two implications constructs racism as something that happens within the hearts and minds of individuals, rather than at the structural level, and further, it absolves those who resonate with the meme from racism: “I am not a racist, because I support critical race theory.” This is not-racism in practice: a positionality that is not reflective of true antiracism, which is an ideology and practice that requires recognition of and action toward dismantling systems of racism, interpersonal racism, and the implicit bias that each of us holds. This is not to say that pro-CRT memes always failed at performing antiracism, either. There certainly were instances of successful acknowledgement of structural racism, such as in Cluster 7, which reads “If people attacked White Supremacy like they are attacking critical race theory, there would be no need for critical race theory.” However, the failures were all failing in the same way: by framing themselves and their ideologies as not-racist, and falsely equating that with doing antiracist work. On the other hand, anti-CRT memes wholly fail at performing true anti-racism, and they fail in many different ways: through rhetorics of racial neoliberalism, colorblind racism, and not-racism. Importantly, each of these tools of racism are constructed as antiracism, and sold to audiences as such. While not-racism presents a bit differently on this side of the aisle, the main takeaway is meant to be rhetorically the same: “we” are not the racists, “they” are. For instance, Figure 3 reads, in part, “What does critical race theory teach?...The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” This swiftly both dismisses racism as in the “past,” thus ignoring its structural persistence and constructs those that support critical race theory as the racists. In this way, both pro- and anti-CRT memes variably fail at performing antiracism, often forwarding what Blake et al. (2019) call “antiracist appropriation,” or a strategy that is “primarily concerned with deciphering who is a racist and who is not, rather than working to dismantle racism’s socially shared institutional and affective structures” (p. 23). By forwarding this claim, we do not mean to engage in an uncritical false balance (Rietdijk and Archer 2021) analysis here, as there is clearly one group that is getting closer to actual antiracism than the other: pro-CRT memes. It is important to note, however, that even pro-CRT memes are not actually accomplishing an antiracist agenda, as they are rather uncritical of the structural aspects of racism and choose to focus, instead, on interpersonal-level issues. Though using appeals to authority is not a groundbreaking rhetorical strategy and is, in fact, one of the pillars of Aristotelian rhetorical philosophy, the ways in which this ethos appears within these memes present an interesting finding: equally often, both pro-and anti-CRT memes deployed the imagery and/or quotes of Black people. Through circulating these images widely, those captured in these memes essentially stand in as Black spokespeople for each side of the argument, lending credence to the meme’s ideology–no matter the side of the argument–through the color of their skin. Appeals to Black Authority Anti-CRT memes that used this rhetorical strategy–all of which, notably, were produced and originally disseminated by the conservative Media Research Center (MRC)†–constructed these Black spokespeople as both authoritative in their experience and authoritative in their Blackness. Alveda King, Civil Rights Leader; Dr. Ben Carson, M.D. and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; and Dr. Carol Swain, Ph.D. and professor of political science and law appeared in these memes, each in visage and in quote (see Figure 7 for an example of these memes, each of which followed this aesthetic template). The embodied Black professional positionalities which these people inhabit make it difficult for pro-CRT advocates to argue against their claims—claims which invariably speak to the sure pitfalls of socioculturally adopting critical race theory—and thus a comfortable space of disseminating racism through the rhetorics of not-racism opens up. Using Black spokespeople to deliver implicitly or explicitly racist information has been a tactic used for decades to make news reporting (Entman and Rojecki 2007), campaign strategy, and political policy (Mendelberg 2001) appear notracist. The implicit suggestion is that if a Black person indicates something is not racist, it must not be. This, then, “bolsters [whites’] denials that racism still impedes the lives of African Americans” (Entman and Rojecki 2007, p. 106) and invites a level of assurance that they, too, are notracist. In the context of the memes analyzed for this study, these Black spokespeople are consistently reflecting a well-established space of Black conservative thought which taps into individualism, self-help, and egalitarianism as answers to discussions on racism (Lewis 2005). Critical race theory–the “real,” institutional one–actually warns against this very scenario: CRT argues that constructing Black spokespeople as people who can speak for the entire race is both essentialist and ignorant to the importance of intersectionality (Delgado and Stefancic 2023). While it is true that Black Democrats far outweigh Black Republicans in the electorate (Cox 2022), and thus pro-CRT memes that deploy Black spokespeople likely reflect a larger share of Black thought, it is still unproductive to count any single person as representative of a race of people. Despite this, however, constructing Black spokespeople through memes–Black spokespeople who are made to appear as the reasonable “Black voice”–was a way of building authority and “assurances” for those against CRT that they were not thinking in a racist way. While their Blackness operates, rhetorically, as an appeal to authority in a conversation about race, the idea of the “Black spokesperson” takes on a different function and meaning in these pro-CRT memes. Whereas anti-CRT memes were curating quotes from a very specific set of Black spokespeople, seeking out those who have said something condemning CRT, overlaying these quotes on an image of the Black orator, and circulating that image, those on the pro-side of the issue are more often amplifying already-existing media that Black people created. For example, the image of artist Jonathan Harris (Figure 1) was an organic, pre-existing photograph of the artist posing with his work–not a computer-generated, curated message that was created without his knowledge or consent. Similarly, the meme featuring Michael Eric Dyson’s thoughts (Figure 4) is simply a screenshot of a tweet he chose to write and publish on the internet–again, not something that an outside entity needed to create. The only exception is the meme featuring John Legend (Figure 9). This meme has a similar aesthetic to the anti-CRT memes in that it is a computer-generated image of Legend alongside a quote about Black parents needing to get involved in conversations around the banning of critical race theory. This meme represents just one way that anti- and pro-CRT memes perform “not-racism” in rhetorically similar ways, even if they have different end goals. [†] The Media Research Center (MRC) is more than simply a Facebook page, which is where many of these other memes are sourced. To the contrary, MRC is an entire conservative media network that self-describes its mission as being in accordance with "America’s founding principles and Judeo-Christian values." For more, see mrctv.org

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

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. 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Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Conclusion & References

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 Background and Related Work While Governor Youngkin may have brought critical race theory into public consciousness, it is evident that the sociolegal conceptualizations of CRT are not the same as those that are causing political divisiveness in our current climate. As such, our analysis is dependent on understanding a) what CRT is, really, b) how widely-circulating public discourse on CRT diverges from these established definitions of it, and c) how these public definitions are demarcating the bounds of political in-groups and out-groups in memes. Critical discourse on race and social media is welldeveloped, and researchers in the field have investigated a range of pertinent topics, including how conversations on race and racism circulate online (Carney 2016; MatamorosFernández 2017; Moody-Ramirez et al. 2021) as well as the interpersonal (Cestone et al. 2022; Lee-Won et al. 2017) and social effects (Ray et al. 2017; Noble 2018) of these discourses. The current study aims to contribute to this literature by analyzing the rhetorical tools through which critical race theory was defined and circulated in Facebook memes, and ends in a discussion of the social significance of this process. What is Critical Race Theory? Critical race theory (CRT) was established in the 1970s when a group of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars began questioning why the constitutional victories of the civil rights era were stalling, or even seemingly being disintegrated (Delgado and Stefancic 2023). In response to these concerns, CRT posits that the legal system, specifically, but political institutions at large are designed to support whites while marginalizing non-whites in both obvious and coded ways. As Cornel West defines it, CRT is “the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy (and concomitant hierarchies of gender, class, and sexual orientation)” (West 1996, p. xii). Taking law as a political agent rather than a neutral power structure, critical race theorists investigate how social institutions create and uphold racism, and with a strong activist dimension, they also seek to change these conditions. As will soon be evident, this legal studies definition is not materializing within most memes considered in this study. However, it does not do to simply state that these memes are incorrect. While they are technically incorrect in an institutional sense, they still make meaning for their audiences–and this community sense of CRT, which gained visibility via artifacts such as memes, may be more politically relevant than the lesser-known institutional definition. How Communities Make Sense of Things: Knowledge-Building and Epistemology Communities build knowledge through a shared understanding of the world and often a shared value system. However, in the current U.S. political climate, this shared knowledge building is often not based on credible fact, which has led scholars to develop notions of “post-truth” societies and “fake news” (Rose 2017). Ways of knowing, or epistemologies, are one lens through which we can discuss the construction of community-built knowledge, and in this case, grassroots understandings of critical race theory. “Political epistemology” is a growing area of research that brings together scholars who are interested in the intersections of political philosophy and epistemology. This juncture provides fertile space to investigate topics such as misinformation, polarization, and the “epistemic virtues (and vices) of citizens, politicians, and political institutions” (Edenberg and Hannon 2021, p.1). The moment we are analyzing — one in which critical race theory is being politicized — lends itself well to theorizations of how political “ways of knowing” materialize and what stakes these epistemologies may have. Of growing interest in studies of political discourse is what is referred to as the “post-truth” age. The conception of posttruth is directly tied to conceptions of political epistemology because many scholars argue that ways of knowing have been complicated by rising disregard, disbelief, or lack of interest in truth (McIntyre 2018). In a related vein, “bullshit” has also been theorized as a contemporary way of doing politics and can range, discursively, from rambling on about topics that one knows nothing about to crafting complex lies with specific end goals in mind (Cohen, 2002; Frankfurt, 2005; Lackey, 2007). However, Cassam (2021) argues that the very ideas of “posttruth” or “bullshit” as tools of political epistemology hold far less weight than others suggest and likely do justice to neither the complicated rhetoric deployed by politicians nor to the public’s reaction to these techniques. He questions their effectiveness as tools of description or explanation in political discourse, and he argues that what is usually described as post-truth or bullshit is often far better captured through the lenses of hate speech or propaganda analysis. He writes, “It is a travesty to describe hate speech as mere bullshit since this does not even come close to capturing what is wrong with it and why it works.” Cassam (2021) is not arguing that posttruth and bullshit are not useful concepts, but rather that it is a grave mistake to subsume political epistemological analysis — particularly post-2016, when much discussion of the posttruth politics came to the fore — under the assumed post-truth umbrella. For the purposes of this study, we extend this notion to not only politicians but to those who are disseminating politicized information, as well. We question how useful it is to write off the mis-/disinformation provided in the memes under study as yet another manifestation of post-truth politics. Political Memes as Objects of Sensemaking Memes, as defined by Limor Shifman, are “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual Internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process” (Shifman 2013, p. 367). Due to the grassroots nature of memes, internet circulation of meme-based information stands in stark contrast to that of “media elites:” a status which may lend a level of authenticity not otherwise afforded to traditional media discourse (Burroughs, 2020). Political memes often work to make complex arguments more digestible for a broad audience. They are thus valuable to study for their ability to “[connect] the political to the popular, the political to emotionally charged, affective media” (Burroughs 2020, p. 192). In what Lankshear and Knobel (2019) deem the “second wave” of online memes, the use of memes as political sensemaking tools, which are often weapons in sociocultural wars, looms large. In recent works, Ross and Rivers (2018) found that political memes reflected in-group tensions throughout the 2016 US presidential primaries, and were subsequently used to delegitimize both candidates–thus creating lines of in- and out-group online communities–in the general campaign cycle. Woods and Hahner (2020) analyzed how the alt-right uses memes to continually re-make what is deemed acceptable discourse on the political right, thus lending authority and sense to increasingly extreme rhetorics within the group bounds. In a study closely related to our own, Moody-Ramirez et al. (2021) investigated memes featuring information on race, oppression, and protest following the marches in response to George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020. They found that memes were a site in which competing senses of reality were being constructed, with often-racist framings of these protests coming to the fore. As objects of sensemaking, the question of why memes are ripe sites for deepening political divides is pertinent. According to Dean (2018), memes have the potential to serve an Althusserian interpellative function. By this, he means they “ ‘hail’ the viewer into identifying with them, either by agreeing with the political sentiments expressed therein, or by finding them funny (or not).” He argues that memes can consolidate political allegiance, entrench antagonisms, and shape political discourse due to their punchy, shareable nature. Askanius (2021) agrees, noting that the visual aspect of memes makes them highly transmissible because images have the capacity to cut across cultural and linguistic barriers. This easy access can “foster a sense of community and belonging...allow[ing] a target audience to be ‘in’ on the joke and self-identify with the message of that meme.” (p. 116) In the case of fringe ideologies, this sense of belonging can serve as a “gateway” to deeper radicalization and divide (Askanius 2021) through similar appeals that analog, leaflet propaganda made: promises and affirmations of users’ sense of tribalism (Nieubuurt 2021). The current study contributes to this literature through its attention to the sensemaking functions of memes following the political eruption of CRT in the early 2020s. Through a mixed-methods approach, we claim that these highlycirculated CRT memes compete for validity by using parallel rhetorical tools to define what CRT is, but ultimately land on vastly different definitions in order to accrue in-group approval and make sense of this political flashpoint.

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

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 Knowledge Production in a Post-Truth World Memes are an excellent vehicle for making hot-button political issues digestible to the average person. However, almost none of the CRT memes we analyzed actually got its definition “right.” Instead, it appears that the most salient rhetorical tools across all 27 of these highly-circulated memes revolved around creating the most convincing definitions of both critical race theory, as that was the topic at hand, and antiracism, as convincing others that an opinion is not-racist is the only socially-palatable way to speak on race in the US in the 2020s. That said, what does this lack of attention to institutional definitions mean in a “post-truth” society, and what should we do about it? Political epistemology allows us to theorize on the importance of these memes as sensemaking and sensegiving tools for the public, and allows us to question the importance of community-based political knowledge over “real” institutional knowledge. In the context of CRT memes, the institutional definition of critical race theory does, of course, matter in a general sense. The work flowing from this definition has produced massive change at institutional and individual levels, and scholars, writers, and activists use these ideas to dismantle oppressive systems globally (Delgado and Stefancic 2023). However, that definition is not the one doing political work within these memes, and we would be missing the point entirely if we critique them as simple misinformation or fake news. In a fact-checking sense, all of these memes, both anti- and pro-, are largely false, but it is not useful to write them off as such. This technically false information is filling an information void for people who have likely never before heard of critical race theory, and that means it is these definitions–not the institutional ones–that are doing political work. The discourse is not actually about CRT; CRT simply became a catch-all phrase to hold discourse about race. In reality, the discourse revealed in these memes is about how the US should handle race moving forward, and how we define what is racist and what is antiracist. The rhetoric within this discussion presents another point of interest: despite research that suggests overt racism has become more acceptable in a post-Trump America, explicit appeals to racism were not present at all, even in antiCRT images. After the election of Donald Trump as the US President, several studies have indicated that explicit (Gantt Shafer 2017) or nearly-explicit racism (Schaffner et al. 2018) became a usable mechanism for Republicans in ways that it has not been since the 1950s and 60s (Mendelberg 2001). These studies argue that the president’s rhetoric ushered in a new era of acceptability of overt racism. However, in the case of the highly-circulated CRT memes we analyzed, this does not appear to be true. While we would argue that, based on Bonilla-Silva (1997)’s definition of racism, antiCRT memes are forwarding a racist agenda, none of those collected use overt racism in the rhetorical style of far-right groups. Instead, they trend toward the more traditionallypalatable implicit rhetorics that have been successful among conservative voters in the past (Mendelberg 2001). This is, perhaps, a surprising outcome of this analysis, and may indicate that there is still wider-spread conservative appeal toward implicit rather than explicit racism. While these implicitly racist appeals follow a long tradition of political rhetoric, the context in which they operate has changed. Following the election of Donald Trump and the ushering in of the “post-truth” era, we argue that implicit racism, in particular, runs the risk of being classified simply as disinformation. It is disinformation, for example, to posit that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” as cluster 22 does, but it is also much more than that: it is a tapping in to white supremacist understandings of what antiracism is. This, according to Cassam (2021), is one of the largest risks we run by taking post-truth as a political epistemology. Rather than understanding these rhetorics as an epistemological formulation of conservative politics, post-truth as a lens for understanding our current political moment could misconstrue this type of rhetoric as simple disregard for truth rather than a calculated dog whistle. This leads us to two main takeaways. First, institutional definitions matter, but they have little material meaning if the public is defining terms otherwise, especially through highly transmissible and easily digestible artifacts such as memes. Second, fact-checking as a practice perhaps misses the mark if it only seeks “truth” in a traditional sense, thereby framing false claims as dismissible, post-truth politics. While it is important to assert truth in a misinformation landscape, it is perhaps more important to understand what the actual issue at the heart of the political discourse is, what the stakes are, and what the use-value of the term being wielded is in order to disrupt oppressive practices and support emancipatory ones appropriately.

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

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 Methods Data Collection In this work, we focused on the popular images shared in the discussion around critical race theory. To identify these images, we collected public Facebook posts and images published between May 2021 and May 2022 which were discussing critical race theory. During that year, there had been multiple spikes in the discussion around CRT on Facebook in line with real-world events like the Virginia Gubernatorial Election, making this time span appropriate for analysis. We used CrowdTangle (2022), a tool provided by Meta that enables searching and analyzing public content from Facebook. We collected all posts from Facebook that contained the term “critical race theory”, and had a minimum of 100 interactions, as we were interested in analyzing the images with the largest reach. We did not include the term “CRT”, a popular abbreviation of critical race theory, in our search query as our early sampling and search results review indicated a high false positive rate for that term (e.g. related to CRT televisions). This gave us 5,662 posts during the period May 2021-May 2022. Since a majority of the posts (around 70%) contained images, we decided to focus on images. The final dataset consisted of 3,906 images that were accessible and downloadable.* Clustering Once all the images were collected, the next step was to identify the popular images among them. We defined an image’s popularity as the number of times an image appears in our dataset. We borrowed Zannettou et al. (2018)’s method of using image hashing, specifically pHash (Monga and Evans 2006) values to identify similar images. pHash is an algorithm for perceptual hashing (Farid 2021) which returns a random string (‘hash’) for any given image. The property of this random string is that perceptually similar images (e.g. images that are slightly cropped, or have a watermark but are otherwise the same image) have similar pHash values. Given the pHash values for two images, we can compute the distance between them to infer if the two images are similar. Clustering is a technique to identify and group similar objects based on a specific property into the same cluster. We used DBSCAN (Ester et al. 1996), a density-based clustering algorithm to group the identical images. DBSCAN considers clusters to be dense regions of data points, handles well the clusters of arbitrary shapes and is also robust to noise and outliers. We performed clustering based on the distance between the hashes, which gave us 190 clusters. Each cluster had multiple images in it, with the cluster size ranging from 3 images to 28 images. Coding & Critical Discourse Analysis Qualitative Content Analysis Because we undertook an iterative image coding process, we included enough images in the analysis to reach thematic saturation (Low 2019), which was 35 clusters. Within this set of 35, several clusters/images were so rhetorically similar that we collapsed them into one category, leaving us with 27 distinct images for analysis. Initially, images were considered apart from their contextualizing captions and comments for analysis, but in cases where it was not particularly clear which code an image should be given, we considered the surrounding text and reactions on the Facebook post where the image was shared to get a better understanding. We carried out the analysis in an iterative manner. First, we decided on the categories/dimensions for which the images should be coded, the most basic being a binary categorization of pro-CRT or anti-CRT. Then, we began qualitatively coding for emergent themes. These codes were refined over multiple iterations until we finally grouped similar codes together to create organized parent codes. Though we created parent codes for multiple image categories (e.g., ‘type’, ‘origin’), we primarily focused on the “role” of images. The set of “role” codes captures how the image is deployed and the message/intent the image is attempting to convey. After coding these memes to better understand their rhetorical functions, we finally engaged critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to introduce questions of power in our semiosis. In this methodology, language is never read as neutral and is instead analyzed for its ideological underpinnings. According to Fairclough, CDA provides a methodology to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power . Fairclough (2018, p. 93) Critical Discourse Analysis He theorizes discourse as a “three-dimensional” structure which is made up of discourse events, discursive practices, and social practice. Discourse events, he posits, are the actual “text” to be analyzed—“text” meaning any culturally-situated object of study—and these discourse events are composed of both discursive practices and social practices (Fairclough 2018). In the case of the present study, memes are the discourse events which we analyze for their discursive practices–what the text and image, together, are discursively creating and reflecting–and for their social practices–how these discourses are tied up in sociocultural contexts. The content analysis allowed us to see trends in the discursive practices of these memes, and situating these trends within the social contexts of political and hegemonic power relations allowed us to make our ultimate arguments on why these memes, as discourse moments, matter in a crowded field of political discourse. ∗We will share a link to this dataset after the peer review is completed.

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Methods

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 Abstract Visual culture has long been deployed by actors across the political spectrum as tools of political mobilization, and have recently incorporated new communication tools, such as memes, GIFs, and emojis. In this study, we analyze the top-circulated Facebook memes relating to critical race theory (CRT) from May 2021 – May 2022 to investigate their visual and textual appeals. Using image clustering techniques and critical discourse analysis, we find that both pro- and anti-CRT memes deploy similar rhetorical tactics to make bifurcating arguments, most of which do not pertain to the academic formulations of CRT. Instead, these memes manipulate definitions of racism and antiracism to appeal to their respective audiences. We argue that labeling such discursive practices as simply a symptom of “post-truth” politics is a potentially unproductive stance. Instead, theorizing the knowledge-building practices of these memes through a lens of political epistemology allows us to understand how they produce meaning. online social platforms, political epistemology, CRT Keywords Introduction Critical race theory, a once-esoteric legal theory, came to public consciousness at least partially through the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial campaign (Barakat and Rankin 2022). Republican hopeful Glenn Youngkin vowed to ban CRT from public education on his first day in office, a promise upon which he delivered with an executive order after his election. Though there is not strong enough evidence to say whether campaigning on critical race theory is what actually won Youngkin the election, there is no doubt that it was a major platform stance that picked up traction both in the state and across the nation (Beauchamp 2021). From this gubernatorial campaign, a flurry of public debates surrounding CRT have ensued in political speech, policy proposals, and social media discourse. Digital social media platforms have been a hub for this discussion where users often share their opinions, beliefs, and concerns about CRT through memes. For this study, we collected 5,662 CRT-centered memes, which circulated on Facebook from May 2021 – May 2022, and qualitatively analyzed the 27 top-circulated memes. We aimed to gain insights into the discourse surrounding CRT and examine how visual means are deployed to influence the public by analyzing the images shared by users. Scrutinizing the dominant themes and narratives in these images, we found that CRT memes provided a site of overt epistemological struggle: both proand anti-CRT camps used similar rhetorical tools to make bifurcating arguments about the stakes of integrating “CRT” into the American socio-cultural landscape. While doing so, these ideological groups competed for the most convincing definitions of both critical race theory and antiracism which a) fit their own political framings, and b) worked to convince their community of followers that their beliefs were notracist. As such, the institutional definitions of both critical race theory and antiracism were largely absent from these memes. We argue that it is erroneous to mark memes that get these definitions “wrong” as simple artifacts of a posttruth society. Instead, we advocate for a more critical look at the ramifications of such visual cultural artifacts through the lens of political epistemology. We posit that these memes are rhetorically complex units of sensegiving that are performing significant political work for both supporters and opponents of CRT.

Online Knowledge Production in Polarized Political Memes: Abstract & Intro

Intriguing developments are unfolding in the global financial markets, and a clear polarisation is materializing among investors. On one hand, there are investors looking to take on risk; the S&P 500 is up 4.67% over the past month and just 5% shy of its all-time high. is surging more than 13% over the past week, and is currently trading above $41,500. Bitcoin On the flip side, risk-averse investors are flocking towards gold. The precious metal staged a weekend rally, reaching an all-time high of $2,148 per ounce. Bitcoin’s Price Hits Fresh Yearly Highs December has started on a high note for Bitcoin, reaching a new yearly high of over $42,000. The last time BTC's price traded around this level was in April 2022, before the market crashed following Terra’s collapse. As highlighted in one of my recent , this bullish momentum has mostly been fueled by the potential approval of a Bitcoin Spot ETF in the U.S. letters I continue to believe the first approval will happen on January 10th, 2024, when the SEC faces the final deadline for a decision on the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF. The Entire Crypto Economy Expands The overall fundamentals of the crypto market have seen positive developments, with several significant experiencing notable increases over the past month: metrics Total adjusted on-chain volume surged by 29.8% to reach $255 billion (BTC: +21.2%, ETH: +43.9%). Legitimate CEX spot volume recorded a robust increase of 52.8%, reaching $445 billion. Other noteworthy metrics showing growth include open interest (BTC: +10.3%, ETH: +19.2%), monthly NFT marketplace volume on Ethereum, which saw a remarkable uptick of 109.5%, and the daily average volume of GBTC, rising by 30% to $119 million. Industry Shakers Societe Generale issues its first RWA-tokenized green bond on Ethereum French banking giant Societe Generale completed its inaugural tokenized green bond issuance on the Ethereum network. Cristiano Ronaldo Faces a Class Action Lawsuit for Promoting Binance Soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo is facing a class action lawsuit seeking damages exceeding $1 billion for his involvement in promoting Binance. The legal action claims that Binance engaged in the sale of unregistered securities and operated unlawfully in the United States, with Ronaldo leveraging his celebrity status to attract users and investors to the platform. The plaintiffs contend that Ronaldo should have been aware of the potential illegality of his promotions and assert that he financially benefited from directing traffic to Binance. Stay Updated - Follow me on Twitter! Enjoyed these insights? There's more where that came from. Follow me on for daily tidbits and updates. Twitter/X Also published . here

Market Polarization: Bitcoin's Surge, Gold's Rally, and the Crypto Economy Expansion

The Moon Metal by Garrett Putman Serviss is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . SOUTH POLAR GOLD SOUTH POLAR GOLD When the news came of the discovery of gold at the south pole, nobody suspected that the beginning had been reached of a new era in the world’s history. The newsboys cried “Extra!” as they had done a thousand times for murders, battles, fires, and Wall Street panics, but nobody was excited. In fact, the reports at first seemed so exaggerated and improbable that hardly anybody believed a word of them. Who could have been expected to credit a despatch, forwarded by cable from New Zealand, and signed by an unknown name, which contained such a statement as this: “A seam of gold which can be cut with a knife has been found within ten miles of the south pole.” The discovery of the pole itself had been announced three years before, and several scientific parties were known to be exploring the remarkable continent that surrounds it. But while they had sent home many highly interesting reports, there had been nothing to suggest the possibility of such an amazing discovery as that which was now announced. Accordingly, most sensible people looked upon the New Zealand despatch as a hoax. But within a week, and from a different source, flashed another despatch which more than confirmed the first. It declared that gold existed near the south pole in practically unlimited quantity. Some geologists said this accounted for the greater depth of the Antarctic Ocean. It had always been noticed that the southern hemisphere appeared to be a little overweighted. People now began to prick up their ears, and many letters of inquiry appeared in the newspapers concerning the wonderful tidings from the south. Some asked for information about the shortest route to the new goldfields. In a little while several additional reports came, some via New Zealand, others via South America, and all confirming in every respect what had been sent before. Then a New York newspaper sent a swift steamer to the Antarctic, and when this enterprising journal published a four-page cable describing the discoveries in detail, all doubt vanished and the rush began. Some time I may undertake a description of the wild scenes that occurred when, at last, the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere were convinced that boundless stores of gold existed in the unclaimed and uninhabited wastes surrounding the south pole. But at present I have something more wonderful to relate. Let me briefly depict the situation. For many years silver had been absent from the coinage of the world. Its increasing abundance rendered it unsuitable for money, especially when contrasted with gold. The “silver craze,” which had raged in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, was already a forgotten incident of financial history. The gold standard had become universal, and business all over the earth had adjusted itself to that condition. The wheels of industry ran smoothly, and there seemed to be no possibility of any disturbance or interruption. The common monetary system prevailing in every land fostered trade and facilitated the exchange of products. Travellers never had to bother their heads about the currency of money; any coin that passed in New York would pass for its face value in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, St. Petersburg, Constantinople, Cairo, Khartoum, Jerusalem, Peking, or Yeddo. It was indeed the “Golden Age,” and the world had never been so free from financial storms. Upon this peaceful scene the south polar gold discoveries burst like an unheralded tempest. I happened to be in the company of a famous bank president when the confirmation of those discoveries suddenly filled the streets with yelling newsboys. “Get me one of those ‘extras’!” he said, and an office-boy ran out to obey him. As he perused the sheet his face darkened. “I’m afraid it’s too true,” he said, at length. “Yes, there seems to be no getting around it. Gold is going to be as plentiful as iron. If there were not such a flood of it, we might manage, but when they begin to make trousers buttons out of the same metal that is now locked and guarded in steel vaults, where will be our standard of worth? My dear fellow,” he continued, impulsively laying his hand on my arm, “I would as willingly face the end of the world as this that’s coming!” “You think it so bad, then?” I asked. “But most people will not agree with you. They will regard it as very good news.” “How can it be good?” he burst out. “What have we got to take the place of gold? Can we go back to the age of barter? Can we substitute cattle-pens and wheat-bins for the strong boxes of the Treasury? Can commerce exist with no common measure of exchange?” “It does indeed look serious,” I assented. “Serious! I tell you, it is the deluge!” Thereat he clapped on his hat and hurried across the street to the office of another celebrated banker. His premonitions of disaster turned out to be but too well grounded. The deposits of gold at the south pole were richer than the wildest reports had represented them. The shipments of the precious metal to America and Europe soon became enormous—so enormous that the metal was no longer precious. The price of gold dropped like a falling stone, with accelerated velocity, and within a year every money centre in the world had been swept by a panic. Gold was more common than iron. Every government was compelled to demonetize it, for when once gold had fallen into contempt it was less valuable in the eyes of the public than stamped paper. For once the world had thoroughly learned the lesson that too much of a good thing is worse than none of it. Then somebody found a new use for gold by inventing a process by which it could be hardened and tempered, assuming a wonderful toughness and elasticity without losing its non-corrosive property, and in this form it rapidly took the place of steel. In the mean time every effort was made to bolster up credit. Endless were the attempts to find a substitute for gold. The chemists sought it in their laboratories and the mineralogists in the mountains and deserts. Platinum might have served, but it, too, had become a drug in the market through the discovery of immense deposits. Out of the twenty odd elements which had been rarer and more valuable than gold, such as uranium, gallium, etc., not one was found to answer the purpose. In short, it was evident that since both gold and silver had become too abundant to serve any longer for a money standard, the planet held no metal suitable to take their place. The entire monetary system of the world must be readjusted, but in the readjustment it was certain to fall to pieces. In fact, it had already fallen to pieces; the only recourse was to paper money, but whether this was based upon agriculture or mining or manufacture, it gave varying standards, not only among the different nations, but in successive years in the same country. Exports and imports practically ceased. Credit was discredited, commerce perished, and the world, at a bound, seemed to have gone back, financially and industrially, to the dark ages. One final effort was made. A great financial congress was assembled at New York. Representatives of all the nations took part in it. The ablest financiers of Europe and America united the efforts of their genius and the results of their experience to solve the great problem. The various governments all solemnly stipulated to abide by the decision of the congress. But, after spending months in hard but fruitless labor, that body was no nearer the end of its undertaking than when it first assembled. The entire world awaited its decision with bated breath, and yet the decision was not formed. At this paralyzing crisis a most unexpected event suddenly opened the way. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Garrett Putman Serviss (2005). The Moon Metal. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8199/pg8199-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

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