Memes are a key tool for extremist communities and conspiracy theories

This is an unfortunate generalization. For anyone under about 35, memes seem to be a useful communication tool in general, that's just how it works these days.

Always fun to see these old media write meme articles and use memes 5+ years old.

Makes sense. They're viral and resist criticism -- attempts at curtailing their propagation. "Look who can't take a joke!"

Memes are shared because they are both funny and relatable, and get their message across concisely. In order for any joke to land, the audience has to already be somewhat receptive.

> These communities attribute social events to hidden plots and the manipulative power of a shadowy elite.

It's not a conspiracy, shadowy elites acting in groups with hidden agendas do exist everywhere. Just to pick one secretive group embedded everywhere with large amounts of power, the Masons [1]. From 1999 to 2009 in the UK it was required that Masons declared their membership if working in positions such as judges and police officers, with a concern that there would be bias. I think that people in these positions should have to declare all potential significant conflicts of interest. I have personally seen how Masons have financially favoured one another.

Secretive elite groups exist everywhere you care to look, but rarely cross paths with the likes of academia. I know of one that doesn't even appear on the internet but is at least several hundred years old. If there is a measurable force acting but you cannot see it, it's either random chance, an emergent behaviour or it literally is a force acting against you.

> Meme of a woman yelling at a cat, one of the most recurrent, with a sexist message related to the coronavirus.

Just because the meme happens to be a woman, does not make it sexist by default. The message is essentially pointing out the possible hypocrisy of caring about your respiratory health and not your sexual health. It would be somewhat akin to eating healthy whilst knocking back a cocktail of street drugs. The underlining claim of the meme is essentially "you don't actually care about this, but you're trying to convince me that you do".

> Another purpose of these messages is to attract new members, explains Brit Davidson, associate professor of analytics at IDSB and co-author of the study: “The humor in memes is likely a key factor in attracting new members to these groups, including people who may not be aware of the full context and impact of the misinformation.”

I think what we actually witness is an international decentralised grassroots ideology. I think there is such an interest because they are not coming to the conclusions that are wanted by long standing establishments (academia, finance, governments, etc). Worse still, these incorrect conclusions appear to be internationally agreed upon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry

For years I've been calling it "meme illiteracy": the inability to communicate outside of reference to some internet trend.

It's really just a sub-category of internet brain rot.

Ha Ha! The 15sec "set your balls on fire challenge" video is SO FUNNY!

I’m a cool edgy memelord; you generate some dubious but funny popular images with embedded text; that guy behind the tree is a dangerous propagandist poisoning the mind of the vox populi.

My anecdotal evidence confirms this. Friends in my home country are hooked on Telegram meme groups and as a result they’re spreading [Russian propaganda] conspiracy theories at alarming levels.

(Russia is really good at weaponizing memes but I don’t meant to single it out, the US has also been very successfully influencing the same country for decades via Hollywood movies for example)