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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

InternetMarch 4, 2022

Memeing our way through the war in Ukraine

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

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.

The classic panel format has resurfaced after last week’s invasion.

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?

Incel memes have been repurposed for the Ukraine war, naturally.

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.

Napoleon (right) is depicted as a short man in a ‘meme’ of yore. (Image: ‘The Plumb-Pudding in Danger’, James Gillray, 1805.)

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. 

The famously homphobic Putin surely would not invade Ukraine unless he were gay.

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.”

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Image: Livestream
Image: Livestream

SocietyMarch 3, 2022

When misinformation spreads like fire

Image: Livestream
Image: Livestream

How one Facebook livestream comment about the parliament lawn fires led to a brand new truth for protest supporters.

Viewers watching the Facebook livestream from protest influencer Chantelle Baker yesterday afternoon (March 2) got to witness misinformation unfolding in real time as a fire within the protest camp changed – according to Baker, and in the space of 10 minutes – from a fire started by “six guys” to a fire started by the police.

At around 3.40pm Baker, streaming live on Facebook from the protest, was alerted to thick black smoke rising from among the tents on parliament’s lawn. “Shit, they’re burning stuff,” she exclaimed. “What kind of idiots would start a fire around all these tents?!”

A burning tent seen on one of many livestreams from parliament

About a minute later Baker wondered aloud, of people she’d seen running around near the fire: “Were those people instigators, because they were covered in masks?”

Among the comments on her stream many were concluding, with no evidence, that the police were behind it, and any instigators were probably working for them. “[There] were plenty of instigators within the protest, the police probably knew this fire was happening,” opined Amanda in one comment.

“Police obviously sent some of their own in to cause trouble the wankers,” suggested Tony. 

Two minutes after the fire began, Baker saw people among the protest throwing more flammable items onto the fire. “These idiots in the corner,” Baker narrated as we saw items flying from the crowd into the growing inferno. “There’s some big angry people in this corner and they’ve started that, and they keep chucking stuff onto it!”

By this point it seemed clear that Baker had drawn the obvious conclusion from what was playing out in front of her – people within the protest crowd had started a fire and were stoking it.

At 3.45pm a new commenter, Ben, posted new and specific information about the start of the fire: “Cops pushed over generator over ignited nylon tent”.

A Facebook comment from Chantelle Baker’s livestream

The comment scrolled by without Baker noticing. “I think we need to go and film the guys that are doing this,” she said.

Only 38 seconds later, a new specific claim arrived in the chat from another commenter, Dan. “Police knocked over a gas cooker caught live on conserve media,” he wrote, referencing another Facebook livestream (I checked the stream in question, it caught no such thing). 

This one had escaped Baker’s notice too, and a moment later she summarised the situation: “There was a group of six guys, they started a fire, and now everything’s going up, oh my god.”

Barely three minutes after it was first posted, Baker saw Ben’s comment and read it out loud to her more than 18,000 viewers. “Cops started it, they pushed over a generator it caught a tent on fire,” she announced. “Wow.”

A minute later, talking to a friend at the protest, Baker repeated the claim. From this point on, the reality, as far as Baker was concerned, is that police started the fire.

The initial fire as seen from parliament’s balcony with police lines well removed from the starting point (Image: Justin Giovannetti)

Some in the comments weren’t so sure. Jordan wrote, “a generator isn’t gonna set something on fire by being pushed over, and the police line wasn’t past the tent that caught fire”. Both seemingly accurate points, but they did nothing to shift the new truth.

A couple of minutes later Baker came across a TV news crew among the tents and shouted out, “mainstream media, you started this! It was your propaganda that caused this!”

She repeated her new truth. “You realise the police pushed over a generator that set a tent on fire?” she shouted at the camera crew. “I hope you guys get that. I hope you don’t say it was the protesters when it was the police that caused this fire!”

There were close to 20,000 people watching Baker’s livestream at that moment. Baker, her viewers and, soon, the participants in countless Telegram and Facebook groups, were convinced: the police had started the fire. All from one comment on a Facebook livestream.

A collage of Telegram posts about the fire’s origin

Other footage of the protest from the time doesn’t support Baker’s version of events. Wider angles, such as those from media outlets watching from parliament’s balcony, show the police line well away from the spot where and when the fire started.

Closer views of the initial fire confirm this, showing police lines holding about 10 metres away from the tent where the fire begins. While it’s not clear in videos which individuals started the first fire, it is clear that they were from among the protesters themselves.

Baker was given ample opportunity to challenge her assumptions when, moments later, she came across a freshly lit fire among tents elsewhere in the camp. There were no cops or tipped generators in sight.

She was filming as a protester picked up a burning cardboard box from the fire and hurled it into another nearby tent. “This is what you get for not listening to the people!” said the arsonist as he gleefully spread the inferno. Chants from others nearby seemed supportive: “burn it all down!”

Frames from Chantelle Baker’s livestream as a protester throws a flaming box into a tent

Despite what Baker had just witnessed, her faith in the “police started it” narrative appeared unshaken. “Yes, we can confirm the police started the fire, they’ve got it all on record,” Baker said a while later in reply to a query in her comments. She would “confirm” this “fact” many more times during her livestream.  

This one huge piece of misinformation, based on a single comment from a Facebook user apparently unknown to Baker, became an established “fact” to protest supporters and spread like wildfire among commenters, posters, livestreamers and even in person at the protest.


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