Is it ever okay to meme at a war?
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on Wednesday night, so did the livetweets. And then came the inexorable social media cycle: the war memes, the backlash to the war memes, the backlash to the backlash to the war memes, and more war memes. The memes themselves were utterly predictable. There were the World War III memes. The 2022 memes. The geopolitical memes. The draft memes. The Wordle memes. The accidental memes. The memes referencing other memes. The memes about memeing. You know the score. We’ve been here before. But unlike previous instances when “WWIII” memes took over the internet, this round of social media discourse has been tinged with grim reality. This is no abstract threat. War is already occurring, and that leads the act of meme-making in a time of crisis to feel much, much different. For starters, most major social media platforms have become increasingly political in recent years, as various political crises have engulfed communities from Instagram to TikTok to fandom Twitter. The days when you could self-isolate from the political conversations around you simply by retreating to your preferred social media haven are long gone. While it’s natural for many people to continue treating those hubs as their personal space to post whatever they want, they’re likely to get an increased amount of backlash from others on the platform for performing their social activity as though it’s business as usual. This lack of distance also leads to deeply paradoxical reckonings with what it means to meme through a war. Take Ukraine’s official Twitter account, which has spent the previous months sharing darkly humorous memes about its political plight, even engaging in something like political shitposting — only to pivot following the invasion and use a very meme-like political cartoon of Hitler and Putin to remind us… not to meme-ify the invasion. Ukraine’s confusingly contradictory approach prompted a whole side discussion about political cartoons, and whether mistaking them for memes is somehow devaluing them, revealing your ignorance of history and the important sociopolitical commentary they provide. It would be equally ignorant to assume that memes don’t also provide important sociopolitical commentary — but the Twitter discourse machine hasn’t been kind to Ukraine memes, and plenty of other social media users have been less nuanced about what they see as the bad taste behind meme-making in the moment. One widespread sentiment that emerged in the hours after the invasion began is that so-called “gallows humor” only works if you’re the person facing the gallows; otherwise, it’s just callous. But despite the widespread backlash to the war memes as they proliferated across social media, coping with a crisis through humor is an entirely expected form of human response. It doesn’t take a huge feat of empathy, after all, to recognize that even though you may not be the person impacted by a crisis today, you could be impacted by it or a similar crisis later on.
