As war broke out in Ukraine last week, so did the memes. Have we always coped with conflict this way? Josie Adams investigates for IRL.
If the Vietnam War was the “television war”, Ukraine could be the “TikTok war”. While we’ve seen front-line footage shot by soldiers and civilians for decades now, the way we’re seeing the Ukraine-Russia war play out is different from how we watched other recent conflicts. We saw Facebook posts from soldiers in Iraq, and live streams from the Arab Spring and the London riots, but for most us watching Ukraine, social media has almost entirely replaced news streams.
We’re learning the political complexities of the situation through social media. Across multiple devices and apps we can watch airstrikes in Kyiv, laugh at Ukrainian farmers joking with out-of-gas Russian soldiers, and thirst over edits of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. We’re consuming tank-driving instruction manuals, slice-of-life portraits, and Politics 101-style explainers. All these things – serious and trivial alike – are spat out at us in quick succession by algorithms making it difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between meme and reality.
Ex-comedian, Dancing the Stars winner, and current president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskiy is at the core of many of these memes; he’s on the front lines of the war, refused to be evacuated by the US, and once played piano with his penis on national television. He is, to many internet denizens, the ultimate chad. On the other hand, Russian president Vladimir Putin is an equally compelling character; but is it normal to reduce these two world leaders to caricatures?
Ridiculing presidents might seem very modern, but it’s a wartime tradition; memes are the offspring of newspaper cartoons, which have a long history of making fun of our enemies. But should we be laughing at memes about something as serious as war? And do we still make our little jokes to rouse spirits, or has TikTok changed the reason we meme?
One man who knows about the newspaper traditions memes were born from is David Monger, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury. He’s an expert in propaganda and patriotism in First World War Britain. He can see how people might draw parallels between how newspapers portrayed Kaiser Wilhem II back then to how we’re depicting Putin today. “It’s an understandable reaction to diminish a deeply troubling character in that way,” he said. “The point is to belittle the enemy and thus make them more beatable.”
The newspaper cartoons of yesteryear and the Facebook memes of today have plenty in common: they simplify and they demystify scary or unintelligible things. Napoleon Bonaparte was famously victim to caricatures by his enemies; even today many of us believe he was a hilariously short man. He was, at 1.68m, actually pretty tall for his time.
For most of us, our social media feeds will be depicting Putin as the enemy. Our apps know we’re westerners, and likely to be pro-Ukraine, even though we probably have very little skin in the game. “Making jokes about enemies, I imagine, is as old as having enemies,” said Monger. “I’m not sure how this compares to us making a meme about Ukraine when we’re at no risk from Russia at the moment. But I think the principle is probably similar.”
He’s right: here in New Zealand, we are not facing a Russian invasion. But we are seeing a huge amount of information, designed to be extremely shareable, on all our devices. Knowing how to separate meme, fact, and propaganda is more vital than ever. Our feeds are full of front-line TikToks, some of which are fabricated. Twitter and Facebook have been struggling with Russian sock puppet accounts and troll farms for years. We are not in the line of fire, but being extremely online means needing to avoid being sucked into the information war; with every Twitter retweet and shared Instagram story, we risk spreading disinformation.
Spreading information, whether it’s correct or not, is more of a priority for today’s memesters than it was for the wartime cartoonists. The aim of First World War cartoonists was to stir up war support and morale, but today’s creators are usually just trying to expand their own audiences. TikTok user Marta Vasyuta has been uploading footage of the Russian invasion on her account, and it’s clear she gets the most views when a trending sound is attached to the video. This clip of what she says is a vacuum bomb has 385,000 views. But her video of an airstrike in Kyiv is set to one of the biggest TikTok sounds of the year, MGMT’s song ‘Little Dark Age’, and has 49 million views.
Monger said writers, artists and propagandists have always had opportunities in wartime. “There was money to be made,” he said. “The National War Aims Committee paid writers and artists to produce material for them.” Some of the wartime humourists would go on to have successful artistic careers: Poy, HM Bateman, and Punch magazine all ended up in the history books.
Newspapers still employ political cartoonists and humourists to skewer our enemies, but meme creators generally have no editorial oversight. There is no drive to share correct or even funny information; the point is just to share as much as possible. Accounts called “war pages” are making the most of footage to grow their audiences. As Russia dropped its first missiles, a now-deleted Instagram page called @livefromukraine began posting as though it was run by someone on the ground. It wasn’t; it was run by a meme admin in the US. He was creating a niche version of Instagram’s broader war-based accounts that collect footage of conflicts across the world and share them to gain followers and, eventually, money.
There will always be opportunists out to make a little cash from tragedies, but most of us are memeing responsibly… right? “Away from the sight of it, what’s funny to you with nothing at stake isn’t necessarily funny to someone with family in the region, or someone actually involved in the war,” said Monger.
But despite our physical distance, we remain in close proximity to all the grisly footage and details of the war. Perhaps creating caricatures of Zelenskiy and Putin can help diminish the troubling nature of what we’re watching.
Monger said that while reducing complex geopolitical issues to a couple of panels might seem distasteful, the concept is basically human nature. “Humour is a way of dealing with very unpleasant things,” he said. “When you get a nasty fright you shriek, and then make a joke of it most of the time.”