Thoughtful, clever, and meticulously researched — this book gets it. As an internet culture reporter, I read this for work, and found myself learning a lot about how memes have made the world turn over the past few years in ways that not even I was aware of. The power of inside jokes and political imagery to impact international politics is a horror story for our time.

A well-presented, meticulously researched and argued text. I assigned selections from this book to my upper-level undergraduate communications course, and the students found the text engaging and accessible. The boon to their understanding from having this exist is highly valuable, given previous attempts/materials did not produce the same level of learning outcomes.

“Meme Wars” is a recent history of extremist internet culture. It is a fascinating account of the rise of Q Anon and other ways misinformation is spread on the internet. Even though I saw these events unfold on Twitter, I did not realize how many of these events and communities were interconnected, or even that there was infighting within these communities. Overall, the book shows how those who are most concerned about the potential existence of the deep state actually operate like one - stoking conspiracies and banding together to harass people, the most devastating case being the coordinated intimidation of the Sandy Hook parents. I would have liked to read more about the American public actually thought vs the memes vs reality, especially pertaining to white anxiety. The book assumes a lot of knowledge on those issues. I think this is an important read to understand internet culture.

Thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Five stars. Very well researched. A good look at the phenomenon from all angles. More than a regurgitation of the controversies of the last few years. Emily Dreyfuss best author alive.

In short, this book makes the last decade make sense. Might be a difficult read if you have no idea what 4chan and/or Gamergate are.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Memes are acorns. Oak trees entice squirrels to carry off their acorns and actually plant them – burying them for the tree, far and wide. Memes are carried off by social media users, enticed by their simplicity and often the laugh they get, spreading them to other users and other media for the benefit of the meme creator. But memes have quickly evolved into weapons of mass destruction, fired into cyberspace to destroy those who might not believe in the politics or religion or rights to hate of the propagator.

Gathering up the acorns, three authors from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Technology and Social Change Research Project have produced Meme Wars, an intensive and worrying examination of memes, the people who exploit them, and the mass armies of the ignorant who promulgate them, and often become their victims. Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss and Brian Friedberg are so comfortable in their topic, it sounds almost normal. But far from normal, memes are a menace and a threat, posing as simplified truths. What could possibly go wrong?

Memes sit over rabbit holes. Once people click around to find more on the meme, they get pummeled with unending extremist takes, “research,” and outright fraudulent websites under the umbrella of the meme. Seemingly normal people get sucked into wacko theories and become (often vile and violent) proponents of them. When Muslims do this, we say they have been radicalized. When young white American males do it, we attribute it to free speech or just dismiss it (though it’s the same disease). It is generally for the benefit of the extreme Right, and it leads to division, violence and rebellion, where most of the country recognizes no such need. From this pool of the radicalized come mass murderers, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Nazis (“Hitler did nothing wrong!”), incels and January 6 insurrectionists.

There is, for example, a chilling chapter on Dylan Roof, a seemingly intelligent teenager who read himself into despising all Blacks. The book follows his online clicks, learning lies, fears and hate, ultimately ending at a Black church, where he gunned down numerous worshippers, who had invited him to join them. Every link he followed deepened his warped understanding of the world. It is a primer on memes and the rabbit hole, and sets up the book just perfectly.

Rabbit holes are so deep, they hook the Dylan Roofs of the country “inspiring people to commit violent acts, abandon their lives, get lost so far down the rabbit hole that their family members had to form support groups to try to pull them out,” the authors say. Aided by tools like gaslighting and dog whistles, memes leverage themselves in the minds of the impressionable.
Memes tend to be visual, thanks to the internet, and the authors have peppered their book with visual representations of the memes and the people they discuss, right below the paragraph where they discuss them, making connections easy. The book is really well organized and effectively presented.

Memes are simplified views of an issue, often employing a line from pop culture – a phrase from a game or song or film, and often used ironically. This leaves it susceptible to doctored images that get laughs galore, causing viewers to want to share them with everyone, and thereby radicalize others.

There are numerous significant memes that the authors cite, develop, and trace to their roots and connect to the real world. Memes like Pepe The Frog, red pills, Gamergate, MAGA, Stop The Steal, FAKE NEWS, alternative facts, Q, Q anon, Kekistan, and He will not replace us.

There is also a long list of meme celebrities, those who leverage memes to gain fame and fortune, often at the expense of others who suffer the consequences of the lies. People like Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn are all profiled in the book, along with many other characters, arrested and prosecuted after Charlottesville or January 6 - memes in themselves.

There is also long discussion of the places where the memes first appear. 8chan and 4chan are most famous for their no holds barred forums, where everyone’s screen name is anon. Reddit is probably the most commonly known by the public. They attract a particular type – young white males, angry and alienated. They do not attract wide audiences like Linked In or Facebook or Tumblr, where everyone has a name and photos, and only too eager to post their status as the originator of whatever creativity they have found or assembled. “They were there to find partners, allies and friends in politics and sex, to share their photography, poetry, art and music and to experiment with gender terminology in memes.” Similarly, Meta/Facebook and Twitter tend to be open and above board by comparison to 4chan and 8chan. Users on those sites hide, allowing them to openly hate. Anything. Intensely.

Sometimes, the memers get a little distance and perspective on what they have wrought: “On November 12, 2017, an anon posted, ‘We’ve become a whorehouse, pimping out slut Q anon vids all over boomer youtube. I hope you’re all real proud of yourselves.’” But such voices fade quickly, and the race to the bottom continues without missing a beat.

Obviously bogus memes get picked up as if they were solidly proven. During the pandemic, a meme regarding adrenochrome (#SaveTheChildren, of all things) caught up young parents into thinking that a shortage of the skin chemical had been resolved by torturing young children and bleeding it from them. The authors point out this is hardly original, that rumor mongers have long promoted the blood libel about impoverished Jews eating children. But mere common sense never stops a good meme. Incredibly, the authors traced it back to images posted by celebrities during the lockdowns – makeup free - making them look worse for wear, like normal human beings. This quickly got attributed to a shortage of adrenochrome, and it was off to the meme races. It fit perfectly among the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.

Similarly, Pizzagate had the susceptible believing that Hillary Clinton of all people, was running a child pornography and pedophile ring out the basement of a pizzeria in Washington. Anyone who walked in could plainly see that not only were there no children there, but it didn’t even have a basement. Nonetheless, the meme persisted and flourished, to the point of causing an earnest young man to drive hundreds of miles to save the enslaved children and shoot the place up. He could not for the life of him understand why no one had sought to do this before him, since the memes and articles were freely available online.

The book is both fascinating and depressing, with depressing clearly the winner. There are untold millions of Americans who glom onto these memes as if they were gospel. They believe the conspiracy theories as if handed down by God. They trip over themselves spreading them to others, couched in anger, angst and hate. And despite all the proof to the contrary, these worshippers continue to believe in Pizzagate and a New World Order, a Deep State, a Jewish conspiracy and of course, a stolen election. Anyone expressing say, common sense or logic in the face of these theories is hatefully shouted down, harassed into silence and made the subject of virulent public shaming including physical trolling and death threats.

The farce of Q anon is proudly proclaimed from sea to sea. This despite the fact Q has not posted a word since December 2020, and nothing he predicted has come true. That of course never stopped Donald Trump from retweeting Q posts throughout the election (We’re talking about the president of the United States), and never disavowed the movement.

It all served to build Trump’s power over his followers: “Stop the Steal, Trump’s last gamble, showed him ready to exploit the very people who had voted for him and who he surely knew were susceptible to his lies.” They went to prison by the hundreds, while others lost their jobs and split their families. That is the power of memes.

Stop The Steal by the way, has long been an arrow in Trump’s quiver. Roger Stone created a website for it in 2016, in case Trump didn’t win the primary. Trump copyrighted it, along with MAGA, allowing him to profit from merchandise sales. And of course, when he didn’t win re-election, he dusted off Stop The Steal meme and got millions of Americans to donate a quarter of a billion dollars his non-existent charity to fight for reinstatement. The meme business is good business.

What will strike the reader of Meme Wars is the exceptionally low quality of the people involved. Their political and societal theories are absurd. Their human relations are pathetic. Their criminal activity is boundless. Even when they win they lose. After Trump’s election, a huge rally called Unite The Right (UTR) sought to bring all the extreme right factions together. It resulted in arguments, fights, refusals to work together, and unbridled racism, nationalism and hate the participants couldn’t even agree on. They were never able to leverage their gains into anything legitimate, let alone unified. But they all led factions that believed in them totally. An earnest attempt to try again with another UTR fell flat on its face.

It is tragic that it is so easy to manipulate Americans into hate, into ridiculous and intractable positions, into vile and violent actions all in an effort to subvert the whole country into accepting their twisted beliefs as definitive.

Let there be no doubt. After reading this book, readers will understand the meme wars are real. And radicalization is not just for Muslims.

David Wineberg

Meme Wars offers a fascinating yet terrifying look into the everchanging world of the internet & social media. The authors illustrated how social media has been used to weaponized & amplified the bad elements of our society primarily using memes. I found this book particularly fascinating but also alarming. In the last several years, the internet & social media has been used to spread misinformation. It has also offered a safe harbor to the dark corners of society. I found this book very informative & worth the read. I would recommend it to the others interested in learning more about this topic.

A huge thanks to Netgalley & Bloomsbury USA for the advance copy of this book.

Meme Wars is both a fascinating history of modern internet culture, roughly ~2008-2021, and a terrifying look into white nationalist, conspiracist, and extremist movements. Joan Donovan and her co-authors trace the interplay between online movement-building ("the wires") and in-person mobilization and action ("the weeds"). They lay out how memes can be deployed to introduce "normies" to extreme ideas, create permission structures, and build community that can result in real-world action (and harm). The authors grapple with the nihilism that seems to be a key ingredient in modern extremism and also highlight how many of the aspects of social media that can produce positive outcomes -- think staying connected with friends and family -- can be put to ill ends.

The last chapter also lays out a cogent platform accountability agenda. Folks who aren't tech/info policy, democracy, or extremism nerds might want to skim, since this book goes deep. But if you're into this stuff, Meme Wars is a must-read.

Full disclosure, I consider Joan a colleague, have learned tons from her, and am a fellow traveler. And thanks to NetGalley for an ARC.

<i>Meme Wars</i> is yet another entry into social media age political discourse. The work's central claim is borderline ridiculous, e.g. meme magic is threatening American democracy. The authorial team of Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg recap the birth and evolution of the "red-pilled right," and its culmination in the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the event of January 6th 2021. Their thesis is that despite the great democratizing promise of social media (initially evidenced by movements like Occupy Wallstreet and the Arab Spring), these platforms were hijacked by powerful and/or malicious actors using memes. This is accompanied by the corollary meme that the "left can't meme" and hence is somehow disadvantaged in the meme war.

But come on, these are utterly ridiculous ideas. One of the first serious oversights is that the authors fail to clearly define what a "meme" is. They rely on a mixture of the Richard Dawkins' and colloquial definitions throughout the work. Often, "meme" just becomes a byword for the authors whenever they're struggling to develop a point, e.g. "It was the memes!" The work is essentially a qualitative historical narrative of one part of one side of the political discourse (i.e. the alt-right) on various media platforms, focusing in on especially fringe figures as if they were enormously influential. The authors are only able to intermittently make the case that some of these figures matter, and the conflation of the truly irrelevant with those who may have had real influence on the discourse is muddling. Plus, the qualitative nature of the work makes it difficult to actually invest confidently in any of these claims.

The only thing you can count on <i>Meme Wars</i> to deliver is a lot of repetitive information about the types of people that frequent the dark corners of the internet, and the things they like to get up to. The authors are quite focused with the "very online" world, but like many of the "very online," their solipsistic perspective precludes actually persuading their readers that internet discourse matters as much as they claim.

When I first started reading Meme Wars I was prepared to read about Trump his allies in their ridiculous opinions but the whole book was mainly about Trump. Just because I am so sick of Trump and just hearing his name causes me to have nausea I am not going to hold that against the authors of this book. It was a good book the research was great they were things I forgot about that were in the book and reminded me they also talked about the very first meme little bee and bass goddess and I didn’t remember that at all! I get that Trump was the first political figure to have a popular social media account and if you would like to revisit all the atrocities he visited all the American public then you should read this book. They cover everything and then some. I will give them kudos because there were a few LOL moments that brought levity to a tired subject. I received this book from netGally and the publisher and I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review but all opinions are definitely my own.

Meme Wars looks at the use and weaponization of memes between Occupy Wall Street and January 6th (2011-2021). Overall, Meme Wars is well researched, organized, and perfect for people who are new to this topic/not terminally online. Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for early access to the e-arc.

Meme Wars is probably the most in-depth explanation of how the alt-right became such a prevalent monstrosity in American culture since the early 2010s. The multiple authors easily explain every detail, person, meme, and environment responsible for the outbreak of this culture.

All of this detail makes it a little bit skimmable for people who are "very online" but even those who have been aware of alt-right circles are probably not aware of some of the more niche and underground communities that the authors describe. I appreciated understanding how not everything showed up on Reddit/4chan/Twitter and the other ways that the "meme culture" had been developing for nearly a decade before January 6, 2021.

I look forward to revisiting this book and following these authors as red pill and black pill culture evolve, no matter how dark it gets.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Transparency Note: I received an advance copy of this book free of charge courtesy of the publisher.
The title Meme Wars made me uncomfortable—that was my first impression. Why did I have such a visceral reaction to seeing the word “meme” on the cover of a book? I hesitated to read it, with a worrying question on loop in my head: “Is this going to be based or cringe?”
The source of my discomfort was the blatant crossover between the online world and the “real world.” If you grew up online in the 2000s, you bore witness to the rise of modern online culture. Drenched in the primordial soup of the digital age, you tacitly understood that memes are not to be talked about in real life. You understood that your online identity was separate from your “real identity” and that the worst possible thing to happen to you would be someone other than your absolute closest friends finding out that you use Reddit or 4chan.
By the 2010s, Facebook and other social media companies dominated the internet. No longer was online culture a secret clubhouse for weird nerds—it was a place where your family and friends, using their real names and faces, would swap image macros and argue about news articles. Do you remember the first time you heard the word “meme” in real life? For me, it was almost like a bizarre culture shock; it was a crossover between two worlds that were never meant to meet.
In 8th grade, I saw a 14-year-old wearing a rage comic t-shirt. Was this an omen? Like finding a crow dead on the sidewalk, did that Me Gusta t-shirt try to warn me what would come next?
The 2016 election was the first presidential election in which tech-savvy social engineers fully recognized online culture’s powerful place in the American superstructure; those who grew up understanding cyberspace and meatspace as distinct and separate had already mastered memetics, but as the two worlds continued to converge, it became apparent that online culture could function as powerful propaganda: the viral nature of internet memes allows ideas, like viruses, to spread and mutate across a population. And by 2016, of course, the primary population of the internet was real human beings with real names and faces.
I felt uncomfortable reading Meme Wars. It’s discomforting to see words like “normies” and “redpilled” used in earnest. That discomfort stems from acknowledging the horrific truth that these words and memes are not detached from the real world at all. But even if they’re connected, does online culture really have much influence on the material world?
I would not say that Meme Wars argues that Donald Trump was actually “memed into office,” but it makes clear that the currents leading to his election were visible online long before they were offline. There’s no easy or guaranteed way to turn online hype into real life hype, but Meme Wars provides an analysis of the bizarre symbiosis between the extremely online and the political that is now eternally present in American politics.
I would have preferred if the book focused a bit more on how the rise of the online alt-right found its roots in the material conditions of offline America, as the chosen framing of Meme Wars could inadvertently misconstrue the idea that these things start on the internet, which is not the case. I also would have liked a bit more about how the propagation of disinformation through memetic warfare often stems from an intentional distortion of actual fringe ideas—the authors briefly touch on the mysterious circumstances of Jeffrey Epstein’s death, but at no point seriously engage with any legitimate non-alt-right reading of conspiratorial content that does have a basis in reality. There’s room for an analysis of how the ruling class and alt-right benefit via the absurd obfuscation of legitimate scandals, but it’s not here.
Meme Wars is not cringe. Am I, though, for saying that? Your answer to that question depends on the extent to which you’ve accepted the reality of American culture today. I’ll leave you to ponder that as you scroll through Instagram, swiping from wedding photo to political infographic to self-deprecating meme.

"Meme Wars" is a waste of paper. It is a compilation of saucy quotes from both the very far left and the very far right. Offering quotations from loony neo-Marists and/or loopy white nationalists adds nothing serious to today's policy debates. Do you really care that some White Nationalist wants a nation that is made up only of Caucasians or that some member of ANTIFA desires the implementation of Maoism? Skip this one and save both your money and your time.

This is an astonishing piece of nonfiction that will inform you and leave you even more terrified than the news likely already does.
I have been keeping up with the news on the rise of the alt-right for the last few years, so a lot of the book was not shocking or surprising information. However, the three authors have done a great job of condensing what has happened in about the last decade on the internet into a very accessible and readable guide. The book begins back in the early 2010s with the growth of memes on sites like 4chan, and traces how these groups developed through Gamergate, Trump's Presidency, Q Anon, the pandemic, and culminating in the January 6th insurrection. There were a lot of photos throughout the book, which were very helpful since a lot of the information being passed between and among these groups were image-based.
I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about the power of social media and dangerous coming from people on the Internet. It is well researched and so detailed, while remaining very organized within chapters so it is easy to follow. The authors show that what happens on the internet has an effect on the world and if we continue to not pay attention, then things may only get worse.
Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for a copy of the book.