Meanwhile, TPUSA spells out its cohesive objective on its homepage. One of mes’s goals now, they told me, is to show others how easy it is to make memes, hopefully encouraging them to start using the medium to express their own political and social ideas. Ī post shared by not everyone in the Meme Union feels this way, but the point of the union isn’t to push a cohesive political message. While their early memes seem to just place “Abolish ICE” in different visual settings (like a Lisa Frank poster, or over a picture of Rihanna ), their later work drills down on more niche leftist ideas, like that universities are capitalist bastions worth destroying and that the work should be abolished. Their outrage over the atrocities committed at the U.S./Mexico border encouraged them to learn “how to do graphic design,” they say.Īmes’s tongue-in-cheek images focus on abolishing policing, capitalism, and borders. They started getting serious about making leftist political images after noticing memes about abolishing Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (“ abolish ICE ”) last summer. Take mes, a white, non-binary member of the Instagram Meme Union in their mid-twenties who lives in Portland, Oregon (and preferred to go by their Instagram handle). Their divergent missions and tactics reflect the larger attitudes of the country’s divided right and left. These two groups, TPUSA and the Instagram Meme Union, are bold font-using avatars of the U.S.’s political landscape. Memes help bring people to Instagram, the union believes, so their creators should be treated by the platform with dignity and respect (this is by no means an officially recognized union, and its members aren’t employed by Instagram, though some make some money using the platform). Sam and Paddy are members of the Instagram Meme Union, an organization formed earlier this year by meme-makers with the goal of gaining leverage in talks with Instagram and supporting fellow, mostly left-leaning meme creators.Īdryn Alvarez, the union’s 26-year-old representative, believes Instagram’s community guidelines are “deliberately vague,” and that the social platform leans on them when banning the types of accounts the union aims to support-mostly those espousing beliefs like socialism, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and pro-immigration. “That is the way they increase the levels of hatred that exist.” They’ve come to believe the intention of “right-wing meme pages,” like TPUSA’s, is to “rile people up,” says Sam. The duo follows right-wing accounts and post their opposing views in the comments. Papakropotkin is a leftist Instagram account run by two late high school-age students in the northern U.K.: Sam and Paddy (they prefer I use only their first names). A user with the handle Papakropotkin, whose avatar is an image of Russian anarcho-communist revolutionary Pyotr Kropotkin, writes, “Side note needed: Those people are running to vote in their democratic workplace and that dragon is cooking their lunch.” Some of this “cutting commentary” appears in the comments section of the Daenerys meme on Instagram. It got millions and millions of impressions.”Ī TPUSA meme’s success, says the spokesperson, is “measured in the cutting commentary and the exposure.” “The thing went everywhere,” says a TPUSA spokesperson, who asked not to be named. It’s been one of the organization’s best performing memes. A post shared by Turning Point USA meme was created by Turning Point USA, an organization aimed at getting young people to promote Trumpian conservatism.
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