Ishita hota BJMC 6th semester SGTU, Gurugram
1. Introduction
Do you remember the iconic series of memes, such as “Bernie or Hillary?“ “Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer”, “ Pepe the Frog, “ etc., that changed the direction of the 2016 presidential election in the USA. Well, in 2026, memetics is not only in politics but has also directly entered the battlefield. Since February 28, 2026, after the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iran, a memetic warfare has also begun, which Iran clearly dominated, as per a article form CNBC As Nancy Snow, a professor and author who studies propaganda, aptly summarised: “What we’re seeing is not just a war of weapons, but it’s also a war of aesthetics. Whoever controls the meme controls the mood.” Iran clearly understood what people see, they consume, and Iran did the digital strike with a great deal of sophistication. At the time when the leaders were clearing their throats, the Iranian embassies and state – backed social media channels were spamming the internet with memes, which certainly left a mark.
Among the various memes that floated, one has truly given Iran the upper hand. It is a LEGO animated video created by Revayat-e Fath Institute, picturing LEGO versions of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu getting thoroughly humiliated by Iranian soldiers, while AI-generated missiles rained across a blocky Middle East. Lego Orthodox Jewish men and Gulf sheikhs scrambled for cover. It was viewed by millions of people and spread like wildfire. It was precise and unhinged and totally did the work for the Iranian front. After that, the trend didn’t stop. Next came the rap diss track calling Trump a Loser and a puppet of Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu’s puppet. This was displayed with visuals of stock market crashes, coffins, and missile footage. In the critical time of the energy crisis, when the US president asked Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, a meme ran from the Iranian side saying, “We have lost the keys.” The digital strike from Iran almost seemed casual, but it was very well placed, such as a massive banner at Vali Asr Square merged Iranian missile imagery with references to the Minab school attack and the Epstein Island conspiracy. The Iranian Embassy in Pretoria added coffins draped in American flags floating near the Strait of Hormuz.
The US counterpart was also trying to cope with the IDF meme, which tried to bring back the nostalgia by posting 1990s footage of aircraft and tanks set to the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” which is either a clever social media play or a cry for help. There was also a group chat meme where Khamenei invited Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian proxies to a “Death to America” thread, but he was only left with a “left the group chat” notification. A SpongeBob clip where SpongeBob asks, “Want to see me do it again?” was used to celebrate airstrikes.
Be it Iran, the USA, or Israel, politicians and world leaders is are also aware that the war cannot be just won by missiles; it is also a competition of mindset, ideology, and influence. The one who can convince people more about their perspective gets the upper hand, and memes have become the easiest and most accessible tool. Memefication works because it influences your point of view without your awareness; you are just laughing at a joke, and unconsciously falling for total advocacy. Memefication of war is not only for the audience’s entertainment, but it is also a strong practice of soft power, where the country is directly influencing the viewer’s perspective about the active warfare. In the current digital scenario, people consume information from social media, and apparently, very much from memes and cartoons. Memes are our daily source of entertainment these days. People share their emotions, ideas, thoughts, and opinions through humour. The fact to discuss here is that memefication is not as recent a development as we think; it dates way back, even before the internet was popular. This article will explore most of the aspects that surround the meme culture, its background, the impact it has created, its contemporary role, weighing its pros and cons, and how humans have successfully turned it into a profitable marketing strategy.
2. *Origin and History*
The origin of the term meme is given to Richard Dawkins, a biologist, who proposed the concept of a meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins derived the term from a Greek term (mimema), meaning something imitated; it generally refers to an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person. In his opinion, memes uphold cultural evolution related to the way societies consume and maintain their knowledge, values, and practices. Earlier online memes were the viral animated Dancing Baby, one of the first GIFs to spread worldwide over email lists, and the Lolcats, pictures of cats with funny text, written using the lolspeak language. This trend continued in the late 2000s, when meme templates like Rage Comics and Trollface gained popularity and established a common visual vocabulary among online humor.
The memes appeared to be introduced in the form of a tool of jokes, but a culture of humor and togetherness. Memes altered this technicality to easily share fresh images and cartoons, which allowed the masses to give comments on subjects like politics, societal evils, and entertainment.
3. *Memetic Warfare and Politics:*
Jeff Giesea defines memetic warfare as “competition over narrative, ideas, and social control in a social-media battlefield. One might think of it as a subset of ‘information operations’ tailored to social media.”
Memes have evolved over the past decade in that it is no longer humorous content found on the internet; currently, memes have been adopted as a political weapon. One of the most striking examples touched on the aspect of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when the so-called meme army was very controversial and stood at the side of Donald Trump. They were all over social media, such as Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, with memes satirizing Hillary Clinton, thus increasing her exposure and motivating young voters to vote for Trump.
Meme have not only been entertaining, but it has also become a stickier strategy than conventional political adverts. Besides the U.S., memes also featured in international conflicts, the Russian case being one of the examples. Russian troll farms are identified to produce and circulate memes to use them to shape the opinions of the world societies, fabricate fake news, and undermine their opponents.
Similarly, memetic engineering teams have been announced by the Taiwanese government, via the Digital Affairs Minister Audrey Tang. Taiwan also has a humorous approach to rumor immunity, also known as humor over rumor strategy, based on memes of humor to overcome Chinese political warfare attacks and disinformation campaigns by state and domestic non-state actors to defend against adversarial in the first shift of how the government uses memes in both passive and aggressive strategies.
Giesea (2015) shares the same viewpoint by claiming that trolling and memes are the new tools ofy propaganda in the wars we witness today. He explained it by giving an example of how memes could be used to attack extremist groups like ISIS.
India has also experienced an increase in memefication in politics. The BJP IT cell has especially worked overtime, creating memes that idolize Prime Minister Narendra Modi and those that derogate opponents. Opposition leaders, such as Congress and student communities in DU and JNU, have resorted to meme campaigns of their own. In this case, the role of memes is to serve as a more modern form of posters and slogans, building understanding, organizing young people, and initiating discussion in the online public sphere.
4. *Memes, Emotions & Mental Health*
All the examples that we have seen there, one thing that is prominent and should be a matter of concern, memetics was a tool of entertainment and humor, but it has now become a way to critique a situation, issues, or person, which is not always done with good intentions. It has now become a strong weapon for spreading deception and, in various cases, false propaganda. The question we should ask ourselves here is, have memes bypassed rationality and target emotions? Well, after looking at how brutal and sensitive memetic warfare can be, we should also understand that every coin has two sides.
Apart from politics, if we ask people how memes affect their lives, then most might say that it is all about relatability, humor, and stress relief. Memes offer us a temporary break from real-life problems and bring humor to a monotonous lifestyle. People consume memes because they give them a sense of belonging. People like seeing something relatable to their situation or life. This is how people form small communities on social media because they find a bunch of people who have the same problems or same habits, or same choices. A recent Indian study found that 65% of people agreed that memes improved their mood during stressful times. It is a thing to know that even a second of humour can stop you from making wrong decisions under stress or anger.
Well, meme culture is very dear to the recent generation; they consume and produce memes about almost everything, which, in many senses, is not at all healthy. Because memes these days include bullying and trolling, which cannot be promoted. Dark humor memes can sometimes normalize or trivialize sensitive topics such as mental illness, violence, or death, leading to gradual desensitization. In the same way, political memes may create echo chambers, just supporting single-sided opinions and polarising or even hateful speech. The other issue is the diffusion of falsehood in the disguise of humor. Memes are short, catchy, and easy to share. They allow false narratives to enter the space undetected, causing people confusion and even worry when they find themselves unable to detect which information is considered truthful and what might be considered memes.
5. *Memes as Marketing Strategy*
Over the course of this article and over the course of time, we have seen how many different spectrums of society memes affect directly or indirectly. But businesses can use trends to make money, and trends in memes. Memification has become one of the most powerful and creative marketing strategies, which is making a ton of money for smart corporations. Memes cost less, provide more impact, are easily accessible, and are culturally relevant. Zomato and Blinkit have set the bar in creating meme campaigns; most of their meme campaigns were a marketing success, according to an IIDE report: “#ZomatoMemes generated 120 million impressions, 2 million shares, and 300,000 user-generated posts within a month.” Meme marketing is a significantly more effective way of engaging the audience than a conventional advertisement: meme content would see approximately 30 percent engagement rates, whereas generic search advertisements would score only about one percent of engagement. Successful meme campaigns, like Heinz #TomatoOrVegetable or Gucci #TFWGucci, have resulted in many interactions unprecedented to date, millions of likes, and comments.
The things that are to be noticed are that this marketing strategy is not a safety net, as it can also backfire and can be a cultural misfit. Like Zomato’s “Kachra ad campaign during the IPL season, where a character named Kachra, a reference to a cricket-playing character in the Bollywood film Lagaan. The concept was to connect him to waste management and recycling. The advertisement was criticized by people who found the campaign to be caste insensitive, as the term kachra refers to garbage in the Hindi language, and historically downtrodden caste groups have been linked to waste-related jobs. The backlash implied that the ad helped to reinforce caste stereotypes.
6. *Conclusion*
Memefication and memetic warfare have been in society for a considerable amount of time, from the times when technology was not very advanced. Now, when artificial intelligence taking the center stage, the future cannot be predicted. Deepfakes and content manipulation are now easy and more accessible, which has the potential to spread misinformation in a matter of hours and create huge scandals or worse, riots and civil unrest. We all should be very careful about where we are consuming our information, and we should be more careful about this much underrated culture of memes. Memes are jokes, humour, a source of entertainment, but they can also be misleading, influential, and false.
“Memes define not just how we laugh, but how we think, vote, and consume.”
