User:Swstephenson1/sandbox2

What I Learned

WikiEdu has taught me more than I initially realized. It helped me understand how to create and edit pages through the Edit Source feature. I learned how to format words and letters in certain ways on the page because of it as well. WikiEdu also helped me to better understand APA style writing. Writing my own article about political meme communication on Wikipedia broadened my knowledge on the relationship between trends in social satire and political communication. I used to think that internet memes were just a source of entertainment, but I now realize they are an incredibly popular tool to use when communicating politics via the internet. Legitimate concepts and ideas are represented in memes more often than you would think, and because of their humorous nature, they are a simple and easy way to communicate.

Political Internet Meme Communication

Political Internet Meme Communication is a subfield of political communication that revolves around the method of using internet memes as a form of communication. Due to the ability to post information and different types of media to the internet almost instantly, internet memes have become a popular form of online communication. Internet memes are typically used as a source of comedic entertainment on social media sites, and the increase in media coverage of elections and other politics has pushed politics to become popular source material. In the political community, memes have become a type of satyrical and occasionally blatant propaganda. Not only do casual internet users create, post, or promote political internet memes, but now politicians themselves have used them to gain an edge on their opponents. Social media has evolved into a competent source of news for the general public, which allows political memes to flourish as they go hand in hand with legitimate news updates. All types of memes riddle the internet and social media, and as the popularity of political communication increases, so does the presence of political meme communication. Political communication has become somewhat of a norm on these sites, which inevitably allows the masses to publicly express their political opinions via meme images and videos.

Defining the Concept

Political internet meme communication is essentially an evolved form of political cartoons. They are attempts to humorize events, people, or places that are considered newsworthy. For instance, in November of 2018, U.S. president Donald Trump announced plans to reimpose sanctions on Iran that were stopped as part of a deal that took placed during the Obama administration. This news was followed by a Twitter post from President Trump himself referencing a popular Game of Thrones expression as a way to communicate his actions to his followers. The post sparked hundreds of thousands of replies, reposts, and counter-memes, which encouraged discussions about the new policy across many different internet platforms.

The open, transparent, and low-threshold exchange of information and ideas Twitter allows shows great promise for a reconfiguration of the structure of political discourses towards a broadening of public debate by facilitating social connectivity. Three perspectives to consider when analyzing the use of political memes on Twitter, as well as other social media sites are:

1. The inclusion, interpretation, and views of information concerning the specific topic.
2. The use of media objects, such as images or videos.
3. The tagging of specific political actors and citizens that are linked through the network.

Individuals that use the internet, social media in particular, to receive their news updates are exposed to political memes on the internet in a multitude of forms. Most people's idea of an internet meme is a standard image, usually a humorous image, with text placed on top of the image that adds some sort of commentary.

Modern Examples

Current U.S. president Donald Trump's aggressive rhetoric and his personal use of political commentary through internet memes may contribute to the recent astronomical rise of political internet meme communication, but he was not the first president to be criticized through the use of a meme. When the 9/11 attacks took place, many liberal-minded internet users shared their conspiracies that President George W. Bush was behind the scenes of the event.

When President Obama was thought to be a Muslim born outside of the United States, many conservatives expressed their lack of trust through memes.

While Britain has been trying to leave the European Union (Brexit), many British folks took to the web to voice their frustrations.

Recently, President Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., posted a meme on his own instagram page criticizing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her political views. This sparked a widespread discussion regarding the behavior of Trump Jr. and the policies that Ocasio-Cortez has in mind.

Roles and Effects

Communication research often emphasizes that the way political news is received depends on how people immediately communicate the news to others. This allows us to make sense of what we see in the news by connecting the events to our personal experiences, giving us social context. Social media allows this process to flourish as we give the news a sort of social test in our heads. This test allows us to realize how we feel about the news by relating it to our own lives as well as others'. Twitter users, in particular, frequently link current events to personal experiences, opinions, and perceptions of the world.his encourages political reception on social media because it is quicker to converse and relate to others than receiving news from regular media. It also leads to more political discussions as more people are communicatively linked to one another. This concept shows the power of political communication on social media, but not necessarily memes.

Content posted to social media sites have the potential to attract unthinkable attention and prevalence, as well as break through temporal, spatial, and geographical boundaries. This content is taking over the global communication network, and social media users are its key distributors. Memes have proven to hold power on social media users due to this tendency to go viral, spreading ideas quickly from person to person. Most modern internet memes' purposes are to engage with others in a humorous way. Although many social media users do, in fact, receive their news through social media platforms, that is typically not the reason they enter the online social world. They enter for entertainment and connectivity, which supports the spreading of memes in a major way.

Due to the rising polarity and aggression applied to political conversations, political internet memes have risen to the forefront of the meme world. Internet memes have been used to persuade citizens to vote for a particular party or candidate, influence opinion on important polarizing issues, and even to communicate with social media users as a campaign tool through paid content creation. These content creators make images and videos that relate to the average social media user, which leads to more views, shares, and discussions. Although the humorous nature of internet memes encourages communicating political satire, several studies show that they have very little to no impact on the actual voting behavior, political opinions, or ideologies of those involved. They are considered to be just a source of entertainment. However, one of the most prominent political internet memes in recent history, Ted Cruz-Zodiac Killer meme, actually caused about 40% of Florida voters to genuinely believe he actually was a zodiac killer. This obviously influenced voter's decisions. It remains a challenge to measure the direct influence internet memes have on politics. The anonymity also protects creators and allows the spread of controversial ideas and fake news.