SE Harman
Doctoral candidate in Politics and International Relations at Swansea University.
Dr Matthew Wall
Associate Professor of Politics at Swansea University and is a Co-Director of the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD). Dr Wall’s publications, research, and teaching interests can be found on his website.
Email: m.t.wall@swansea.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 6: The digital campaign
62. Local news and information on candidates was insufficient (Dr Martin Moore, Dr Gordon Neil Ramsay)
63. The Al election that wasn’t – yet (Prof Helen Margetts)
64. Al-generated images: how citizens depicted politicians and society (Niamh Cashell)
65. The threat to democracy that wasn’t? Four types of Al-generated synthetic media in the General Election (Dr Liam McLoughlin)
66. Shitposting meets Generative Artificial Intelligence and ‘deep fakes’ at the 2024 General Election (Dr Rosalynd Southern)
67. Shitposting the General Election: why this campaign felt like one long meme (SE Harman, Dr Matthew Wall)
68. Winning voters’ hearts and minds… through reels and memes?! How #GE24 unfolded on TikTok (Dr Aljosha Karim Schapals)
69. Debating the election in “Non-political” Third Spaces: the case of Gransnet (Prof Scott Wright et al)
70. Which social networks did political parties use most in 2024? (Dr Richard Fletcher)
71. Facebook’s role in the General Election: still relevant in a more fragmented information environment (Prof Andrea Carson, Dr Felix M. Simon)
72. Farage on TikTok: the perfect populist platform (Prof Karin Wahl-Jorgensen)
In this chapter, we discuss how internet memes were used by the main protagonists of the campaign. Our takeaways are firstly that 2024 saw a dramatic escalation of meme posting by parties on social media relative to previous elections, secondly that memes were used largely for negative campaigning; exploiting the target-rich environment created by the Conservative Party’s dire campaign. Finally we argue that that the campaign arc itself had a memetic logic: it spawned iterative potent images and catchphrases, recalled and remixed across both social and traditional media, often expressing derision of party leaders through opportunistic and recursive reframing.
We adopt Milner’s definition of memes as “multimodal artefacts remixed by countless participants, employing popular culture for public commentary.” This captures the communicative format and political nature of the type of memes that political parties and partisans deploy in modern elections. Reflecting on the 2016 Trump vs Clinton campaign, Chmielewski asserts, “Internet memes have emerged as the lingua franca of the modern campaign. Those humorous images, short videos and slogans ricochet across Twitter and Facebook with the speed of an irresistible piece of celebrity gossip.”
The cruel and fickle nature of memetic communication has long been apparent. One of the early innovators of digital campaigning using online humour was 2004 US presidential candidate Howard Dean, but, following his famous ‘Dean Scream’ he found the joke was on him; now, in 2024, Rishi Sunak has demonstrated winning the meme war in all the wrong ways.
Despite two decades’ passage, how internet memes function within electoral politics remains little understood for being difficult to analyse. Part of this lies in the ambiguity of the meme qua concept – memes can be deployed as communicative devices but also serve as units/vectors of cultural reproduction and amplification and represent a form of (often subversive) humour. Anonymity and fluidity contribute to defying traditional campaign measurements of persuasion and influence. Polysemy, a term that captures the capacity of memes to simultaneously communicate multiple messages, which can be picked up in different ways by different viewers, is a further characteristic that makes memes intractable for political analysts and unpredictable for campaigners.
Southern provides a potted history of memes in UK elections up to 2019. She points to forerunners of memetic campaign activity that can be discerned as early as 2010 when www.MyDavidCameron.com allowed all comers to insert slogans into the Conservative’s flagship poster. While 2017 saw extensive use of memes by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, 2019 was the first UK election characterised by the sustained use of memes as part of the formal online campaigns of major parties and candidates.
It was from early in the 2024 campaign that memetic communications ramped up across the field. All parties deployed memes liberally across social media, some proving very popular. The most viewed party TikTok post of the campaign (with 5.1 million views by election day) was Labour’s reprise of the Cilla Black ‘Surprise Surprise’ meme in response to Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a new national service scheme as a Conservative policy. Notably failing to learn from Cameron’s 2010 slogan-writing web app, Sunak generously gifted anti-Conservative shitposters with Photoshop-begging flip charts.
We are keen to emphasise the prevalence of a specific form of humour: snark. This combination of sarcasm, mockery, and irreverence was a common aspect of many of the memes deployed by the parties in this campaign.
The snarky tone of Labour’s (and other opposition parties) memes in their treatment of Sunak makes contextual sense because the Conservatives ran one of the most incompetent campaigns by a governing party in the history of British politics. To many of us doomed by professional obligation to follow the thing day by day, suspicion arose that they were doing a bad job on purpose: launching the campaign in the rain, leaving the D-Day commemoration event early, becoming embroiled in a gambling scandal, and being generally oblivious – the Tories served up ample opportunity for memetic mockery. Notably, snark and memes are each well suited to leverage destructive communications and candidate delegitimization. Indeed, the Conservative Party’s memes were also largely examples of negative campaigning, targeting Labour and Keir Starmer.
It is standard for academics to lament the lack of substance at the end of a political campaign, but the 2024 UK General Election felt particularly vapid. Absent a clash of ideas, we were largely treated to a clash of memes – often in images altered from what leaders sought to project. Absent purchase in compelling meme analysis, the meme listicle was standard fare reporting. Reappropriated and regurgitated images flooded online and traditional media throughout – Rishi Sunak is all wet, Keir Starmer is the son of a toolmaker, Ed Davey is sporty, and Nigel Farage is pranked – this is the election’s cultural shorthand for the six weeks we’ve just spent – which, as the title of this chapter asserts, felt like one long meme.
