Analysis of Facebook Meme Groups Used During the 2016 US Presidential Election

Using content analysis, this study examines how citizens may use memes to share grassroots political ideas in a social media group setting during elections. Specifically, it offers a glimpse at the types of meme-related Facebook pages that emerged during the 2016 presidential election with an emphasis on representations of the two front-runner candidates—Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Generally, Facebook-meme pages and profile photos of both candidates were negative in tone with Trump more likely to be framed in terms of his hairstyle and facial expressions and Clinton in terms of the email scandal and her relationships with people. Political party and gender differences between these two candidates contributed to variations in representations. Study findings are important as they offer a look at grassroots use of memes during a major election and provide a general overview of Facebook user depictions of the two politicians.

[1]  M. Mcluhan.  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , 1964 .

[2]  H. Innis.  The Bias of Communication , 1964 .

[3]  Martin J. Medhurst,et al.  Political cartoons as rhetorical form: A taxonomy of graphic discourse , 1981 .

[4]  A Study of Newsmagazine Photographs of the 1984 Presidential Campaign , 1986 .

[5]  D. Nilsen.  The Social Functions of Political Humor , 1990 .

[6]  Mark N. Popovich,et al.  Newsmagazine Visuals and the 1988 Presidential Election , 1991 .

[7]  Mythe & Presidential Campaign Photographs , 1994 .

[8]  Bernard Grofman,et al.  Modeling Negative Campaigning , 1995, American Political Science Review.

[9]  A. Wilhite,et al.  Campaign Tactics and the Decision to Attack , 1998, The Journal of Politics.

[10]  Audrey A. Haynes,et al.  Attack Politics in Presidential Nomination Campaigns: An Examination of the Frequency and Determinants of Intermediated Negative Messages Against Opponents , 1998 .

[11]  James Devitt,et al.  Framing Gender on the Campaign Trail: Female Gubernatorial Candidates and the Press , 2002 .

[12]  Paul S. Herrnson,et al.  Women Running “as Women”: Candidate Gender, Campaign Issues, and Voter-Targeting Strategies , 2003, The Journal of Politics.

[13]  William E. Ryan,et al.  Looking Presidential: A Comparison of Newspaper Photographs of Candidates in the United States and Taiwan , 2004 .

[14]  F. Fico,et al.  Male and Female Sources in Newspaper Coverage of Male and Female Candidates in Open Races for Governor in 2002 , 2005 .

[15]  Joan L. Conners,et al.  Visual Representations of the 2004 Presidential Campaign , 2005 .

[16]  Robert H. Wicks,et al.  Managing Voter Impressions: The Use of Images on Presidential Candidate Web Sites During the 2000 Campaign , 2006 .

[17]  Michele Knobel,et al.  Memes and Affinity Spaces: Some Implications for Policy and Digital Divides in Education , 2006 .

[18]  R. Dawkins.  The selfish gene, 30th anniversary ed. , 2006 .

[19]  E. Kilpinen,et al.  Memes versus signs: On the use of meaning concepts about nature and culture , 2008 .

[20]  Visualizing Barack Obama , 2009 .

[21]  Emily T. Metzgar,et al.  Social Media and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election , 2009 .

[22]  Anthony M. Limperos,et al.  The 2008 Presidential Election, 2.0: A Content Analysis of User-Generated Political Facebook Groups , 2010 .

[23]  Jeffrey C. Neely,et al.  The Writing on the Wall: A Content Analysis of College Students' Facebook Groups for the 2008 Presidential Election , 2010 .

[24]  Thomas J. Johnson,et al.  Introduction: The Facebook Election , 2010 .

[25]  It was a Facebook revolution": Exploring the meme-like spread of narratives during the Egyptian protest , 2013 .

[26]  Limor Shifman,et al.  Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker , 2013, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[27]  Theodore A. Fernando.  The power of cartoons: Depicting the political images of Mahinda Rajapakse and Sarath Fonseka as presidential candidates , 2013 .

[28]  R. Milner.  Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement , 2013 .

[29]  L. Silvestri.  Surprise homecomings and vicarious sacrifices , 2013 .

[30]  Brian H. Spitzberg.  Toward a Model of Meme Diffusion (M3D) , 2014 .

[31]  Rebecca M. L. Curnalia,et al.  The “Ice Queen” Melted and It Won Her the Primary: Evidence of Gender Stereotypes and the Double Bind in News Frames of Hillary Clinton's “Emotional Moment” , 2014 .

[32]  Stefka Hristova.  Visual Memes as Neutralizers of Political Dissent , 2014 .

[33]  The Pleasure and Play of Pepper Spray Cop Photoshop Memes , 2014 .

[34]  An Xiao Mina,et al.  Batman, Pandaman and the Blind Man: A Case Study in Social Change Memes and Internet Censorship in China , 2014 .

[35]  Bradley E. Wiggins,et al.  Memes as genre: A structurational analysis of the memescape , 2015, New Media Soc..

[36]  Heidi E. Huntington.  MENACING MEMES? AFFECT AND EFFECTS OF POLITICAL INTERNET MEMES , 2015 .

[37]  Hua Wang,et al.  From a Marketplace to a Cultural Space , 2015 .

[38]  X. Martínez-Rolán,et al.  The use of memes in the discourse of political parties at Twitter: analysis of the 2015 state of the nation debate , 2016 .

[39]  Rodríguez, Delia (2014): "Memecracia. Los virales que nos gobiernan. Cómo las ideas contagiosas usan Internet para manipular a la gente". Madrid. Gestión 2000, 206 páginas. , 2016 .

[40]  H. Brosius,et al.  Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide , 2016 .

[41]  Marta Dynel,et al.  “I Has Seen Image Macros!” Advice Animals Memes as Visual-Verbal Jokes , 2016 .

[42]  ‘I Have a Drone’: Internet memes and the politics of culture , 2016 .

[43]  Digital dispatches from the 2016 US election: Popular culture intertextuality and media power , 2017 .

[44]  Alejandro Saez-Martin,et al.  Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook? , 2018, New Media Soc..

[45]  Counter-hegemony: grassroots use of the Internet to save dialects in China , 2018 .