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What Do You Meme It’s Not Credible? Using Memes to Counter Misleading Information

Christina Boyle, CUNY - College of Staten Island

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Where did the term “meme” originate?

  • “Meme” coined by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)
  • Cultural units that are shared and which evolve:
  • “...memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins, 1976, p. 188-90)
  • Memes include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (Dawkins, 1976, p. 188-90)
  • Memetics: evolutionary theory applied to ideas

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Internet memes

  • Can be any bit of digital information that is shared, including videos, gifs, images, etc.
  • “Image Macros” refer to images with text superimposed onto the picture, often what most think of when hearing the word “meme”

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“Grumpy Cat,” KnowYourMeme, n.d.

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“Meme,” Google Trends, 2018.

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Memes are Made for Sharing

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  • Memes are easy to share
  • Generally created with the intent to share
  • Social media provides forum for sharing memes
  • Going “viral”

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A Vehicle for Misinformation

  • Anyone can create a meme, problematic due to no editorial control or fact-checkers (Pal & Chua 2016, Mintz 2016)
  • Takes only a few moments
  • Meme generator
  • No technological skills needed
  • Easy to share, easy to find with hashtags

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Two Truths and a Lie (Meme Edition)

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Two Truths and a Lie (Meme Edition)

Quote by George Washington Speech to both Houses of Congress, Jan. 8, 1790. Info from Bartleby.com’s Barlett’s Familiar Quotations

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True Memes:

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  1. Twelfth Night. Act ii. Sc. 5. (Barlett’s Familiar Quotations)
  2. The Analects, Chapter 4, The University of Southern California, China Institute https://china.usc.edu/confucius-analects-4�

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Two Truths and a Lie (Meme Edition)

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Two Truths and a Lie (Meme Edition)

Fabricated statistic

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True Memes:

  1. CQ Researcher http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2018042000
  2. Pew Research Center: http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media/

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Two Truths and a Lie (Meme Edition)

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Two Truths and a Lie (Meme Edition)

According to the Mayo Clinic, there is not enough definitive evidence to support the notion that vitamin D deficiency causes Dementia, nor that taking vitamin D supplements will prevent the disease.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/expert-answers/vitamin-d-alzheimers/faq-20111272

True Memes:

  1. CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/obesity/facts.htm
  2. CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/alcohol.htm �

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A Vehicle for Misinformation

  • 2012 & 2016 Presidential Elections (Ross & Rivers 2017)
  • Controversial topics
    • Global Warming/Environmental Issues
    • Gun control
    • Immigration
  • Fake News
    • Can encompass information designed with the intention to mislead, fabricated or skewed information, satire that is not clear or is shared as fact, extremely partisan views that are presented as factual or are easily taken as objective information (Bluemle 2018)

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False/Misleading Meme Examples (Source: Snopes.com)

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Sharing Misinformation

  • Especially shared by college students
  • Many college students witness their friends on social media sharing false information
  • Why is this information shared?
    • Interesting
    • Confirmation bias (Mihailidis & Viotty 2017)
    • Provocative
    • To spark debate
    • Accuracy was not cited as high priority (Chen et. al 2015)
    • Bots & social media algorithms are responsible for sharing misinformation (Burkhardt 2018)

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Students Lack Information Literacy Skills

  • Information is shared easily and spread rapidly, which provides extra challenges for librarians
  • Lack of information gatekeepers, which can be both beneficial and harmful (Mintz 2012)
  • Appears to be major lack of concern with veracity of information, and/or sever deficiency in information literacy skills (Mihailidis & Viotty 2017)
  • Cannot be assumed that digital natives are also information literate (McGrew et. al 2017, Stones 2017)
  • Properly informed citizenry is essential pillar of democracy - misinformation threatens this
  • Once misinformation is viral on the internet, it is very difficult to correct it (Gordon-Murnane 2012)

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Our Role as Librarians

  • Teens & adults tend to believe the information presented in social media news feeds without skepticism (El Rayess et. al 2017)
  • Our responsibility to teach information literacy as it applies to various media types (ACRL Framework for IL)
  • Various methods should be used to teach critical thinking (Wells 2018)
  • Social media platforms may try to change algorithms to decrease spread of fake news, but students are still in major need of information literacy skills, since they are very often fooled by misinformation (Bluemle 2018)
  • We need new methods for encouraging evaluation of information on the internet other than checklists (Breakstone et. al 2018, Batchelor 2017)

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Create memes to encourage skepticism

  • When teaching information literacy as it pertains to digital sources of (mis)information, it makes sense to use a digital medium
  • Memes can be created with ease and shared on library social media
  • Memes are visual and succinct, and are already ubiquitous across social media
  • Visual interpretations of information
  • A supplement to information literacy instruction
  • Memes are already used in education and in library marketing (Gasun 2013, Silva 2016, Sagun 2013)

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Tips for creating memes

  • Use popular culture as a hook
  • Use recognizable meme templates/images
  • Use humor when appropriate
  • Incorporate the memes into information literacy instruction to facilitate interactive engagement
  • Use photos of your own library space to encourage a feeling of familiarity
  • Helpful websites and meme generators:

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Memes to encourage information literacy - examples

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Conclusion

  • Image macro memes present new challenges in the fight against misinformation
  • Internet users are severely lacking in information literacy skills to evaluate information, including memes
  • Memes can be created and shared by anyone, and spread easily and quickly
  • To combat this, librarians should create memes that encourage critical thinking and evaluation of all information

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Citations

Batchelor, O. (2017). Getting out the truth: the role of libraries in the fight against fake news. Reference Services Review, 45(2), 143–148. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-03-2017-0006

Bluemle, S. R. (2018). Post-facts: information literacy and authority after the 2016 election. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 18(2), 265–282. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2018.0015

Chen, X., Sin, S.-C. J., Theng, Y.-L., & Lee, C. S. (2015). Why students share misinformation on social media: motivation, gender, and study-level differences. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 41(5), 583–592. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2015.07.003

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

El Rayess, M., Chebl, C., Mhanna, J., & Hage, R.-M. (2018). Fake news judgement: the case of undergraduate students at notre dame university-louaize, lebanon. Reference Services Review, 46(1), 146–149. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-07-2017-0027

Gordon-Murnane, L. (n.d.). The Intentional Misleading of the American Public: Political Misinformation. In A. P. Mintz (Ed.), Web of Deceit: Misinformation and Manipulation in the Age of Social Media (pp. 107–132). Information Today, Inc. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csicuny/detail.action?docID=840080

McGrew, S., Ortega, T., Breakstone, J., & Wineburg, S. (2017). The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment. American Educator, 41(3), 4–9.

Mihailidis, P., & Viotty, S. (2017). Spreadable spectacle in digital culture: civic expression, fake news, and the role of media literacies in “post-fact” society. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(4), 441–454. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764217701217

Mintz, A. P. (2012). If it’s on the internet, it must be true. In Web of Deceit: Misinformation and Manipulation in the Age of Social Media (pp. ix–xxi). Information Today, Inc. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csicuny/detail.action?docID=840080

Pal, A., & Chua, A. Y. K. (2016). Reviewing the landscape of research on the threats to the quality of user-generated content: reviewing the landscape of research on the threats to the quality of user-generated content. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 53(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301077

Ross, A. S., & Rivers, D. J. (2017). Digital cultures of political participation: Internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 U.S Presidential candidates. Discourse, Context & Media, 16, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.01.001

Sagun, K. K. A. (2013). Internet memes as an information dissemination tool for libraries: the ateneo de manila university experience. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 103, 542–550. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.10.371

Silva, A. (2016). Digital Literacies and Visual Rhetoric: Scaffolding a Meme-Based Assignment Sequence for Introductory Composition Classes. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.

Stones, E. (2017). “Nobody puts baby in a binder”: Using memes to teach visual reason. Communication Teacher, 31(3), 137–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2017.1314525

Wells, D. D. (2018). You all made dank memes: using internet memes to promote critical thinking. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(2), 240–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1406363

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