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[memesandcovidrhetoric]

COVID-19 Rumours, Rhetoric and Public Discourse through Memetic Media

The propagation and mutation of memes throughout the Covid-19 pandemic are integral to the communication of ideas stage of the outbreak narrative. In discussing ideas about an emerging disease, groups often construct rumours as explanatory tools for paradigm-shifting events (Kroeger 2003, 243-257). Many of these rumours about the etiology of SARS-Cov-2 and public health measures draw from preexisting racialized, xenophobic and colonially discursive narratives such as ‘Yellow Peril’ (Sharp 2014) and from vaccine distrust (Farooq & Rathore 2021). Memes appropriate indisputable facts, or premises, about the world and use them to reinforce unfounded metanarratives (Milner 2018, 2-4 & 14-15). These rumours are spread through participatory and memetic media which in turn alter individuals’ behaviour, thus shaping the pandemic’s outbreak narrative and cultural memory (Wald 2008, 1-13).

COVID-19 discourses are founded in metanarratives but vehicled through memes. Memes take these metanarratives and mobilize them into bite-sized, shareable and consumable images or phrases (Pulos 2020). The quick decoding required for engaging with memes presents their content as iterations of unobjectionable information rather than reflective of agendas with real-world effects. Memes rely on intertextual connections to other memes and real-world events in order to cyclically repeat certain appropriated premises, eventually establishing them in public discourse (Milner 2018, 2-4 & 14-15). The accessibility of participatory and memetic media provides the public with the opportunity to contribute to public discourses, thereby theoretically producing a platform for publicly marginalized perspectives. However, this polyvocality is misleading as dominant perspectives silence those historically marginalized (Milner 2018, 111-113). During the pandemic, this has resulted in asymmetrical silencing of ideas and people, oftentimes with the most dangerous rising to prominence. The premises appropriated by memes are quickly weaponized when drawing from racist and fringe anti-science circles. It is far from hyperbolic to say that the rhetoric spread through memes and participatory media in newly interconnected online communities contributes significantly to deaths from COVID-19 and the rise of overt white supremacist rhetoric in mainstream media and public health discourses (Hotez 2021)¹⁰. This blog will explore how the vehicle of memes and participatory media interact with COVID-19 rumours, rhetoric and public discourse. It will demonstrate key memetic characteristics as they relate to COVID-19 discourses in public and private spheres, while pointing to specific memes to provide tangible examples.

[memesandcovidrhetoric]

COVID-19 and Memetic Relationships

BAT SOUP (Bat Soup Meme 2020) exemplifies how memes exist intertextually in the liminal space between cultural references, and are not accessible as individual texts or images (Milner 2018, 2-4). It is impossible to understand BAT SOUP without prior knowledge of wet markets, the etiology of SARS-Cov-2 and the ongoing pandemic. The meme leads the viewer to then create connections based upon BAT SOUP’s relationship to these references, which are situated in broader metanarratives. This illustrates memetic dictation of how, when and by whom a meme and its ideas can be understood. Memetic forms of participatory media join the conversation around COVID-19 and in turn construct its public discourse (Milner 2018, 2-4). These mediums have fundamentally changed disease discourse, public health measures and experiences of pandemics. It is no longer purely news, television and world leaders disseminating information that shapes the larger public discourse (Milner 2018, 2-4). Instead, anyone with a smartphone, an internet connection and any knowledge of the pandemic can join public health and political discourses from the comfort of their Twitter handle.

The world of participatory media redefines public discourses during pandemic times as it is produced, constructed and maintained by memetic relationships. Despite participatory media’s accessibility, participation is predicated upon the relational, intertextual context of the subject of a meme. Each COVID-19 meme reflects the appropriated premise and supports its metanarrative of origin, thus rhetoricizing greater public health discourses. BAT SOUP (Bat Soup Meme 2020) reflects medicalized nativist perspectives in the West and longstanding narratives such as ‘Yellow Peril” (Sharp 2014), reinforcing binaries of West versus East, white versus other, civilized versus uncivilized. This further perpetuates “Yellow Peril” fears of an infectious immigrant intentionally contaminating the healthy West with the diseases of its antiquated past (Wald 2008, 1-13). These narratives have resurged and spread rapidly (Tessler, Choi, & Kao 2020, 1-11) through memes during COVID-19, infiltrating and shaping public and political discourses regarding the pandemic and its implications (Sharp 2014).

[memesandcovidrhetoric]

COVID-19 and Narratives

During a pandemic, memetic media’s most important characteristic is its ability to mobilize metanarratives into individually consumable forms of media. They compartmentalize the key elements of a metanarrative and transform its message into a seemingly unrelated and independent image or phrase (Pulos 2020). Consequently, metanarratives are absorbed faster, implicitly, conversationally and reiterated constantly. Appropriating well-known, fixed premises such as SARS-Cov-2’s origin in China are balanced with novel expressions of memes about bats (Milner 2018, 14-15). We can see how memes facilitate public participation and reframe medicalized nativist narratives as iterations of objective information about culture, public health and non-Western nations (Wald 2008, 1-13). 

Medical populist rhetoric is an important factor which informs American pandemic media. For example, memes such as Anti-Vaxxer Drake simplify SARS-Cov-2’s immunology, treatment and solutions into bite-sized phrases like “99.97% recovery rate” and pits the public against all regulatory bodies and a “corrupt industry” that produced an “experimental vaccine” which supposedly “alters [your] DNA” (Anti-Vaxxer Drake Meme 2020). Although these memes may appear easily dismissible, participatory media connects unfounded rumours to fact-based premises which then reinforce racist and xenophobic metanarratives. Memetics’ resonance is prioritized above accuracy of information, leading to widespread misinformation and misconception (Milner 2018, 111-113)

[memesandcovidrhetoric]

COVID-19 and its Sources

Memetic life cycles involve repeating trending phrases and images that support the theory of illusory truth, in which audiences lend credibility to information upon its repetition regardless of its known falsity (Pennycook, Cannon, & Rand 2018, 1865-1880). Memes reproduce pre-established narratives such as the colonial figuration of Asian people as disease-ridden (Bat Soup Meme 2020), and undercut public confidence in vaccine and health measures through targeted memes such as those aimed at AstraZeneca (AstraZeneca Meme 2021). The colonial supremacist and white industrialist metanarratives that underpin popular social discourses are mobilized in COVID-19 memes and cyclically determine how people discuss and respond to the pandemic. Whether it be the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes (Tessler, Choi, & Kao 2020, 1-11) or impacts on vaccine compliance rates (Puri, Coomes, Haghbayan, & Gunaratne 2020, 2586-2593), these metanarratives and memes have a hand in producing pandemic and cultural memory shaping events. 

The anonymous creation and propagation of memetic media is another integral characteristic in its shaping of pandemic discourse. As memes appropriate images, phrases and concepts without context, they eliminate points of origin and explicit reference to source information (Milner 2018, 14-15). Once the memetic cycle of appropriation, repetition and reappropriation has begun, the creator and origin are inconsequential for the function of the meme. The referential information is unknown, unimportant and anonymously provided, creating the illusion of anonymous, unbiased objectivity. For example, the BAT SOUP image originated in a 2016 Youtube video filmed in Palau, a territory of the United States (Mas 2020). However, its unsourced use in the context of COVID-19 evokes connections to overemphasized Chinese wet markets, supporting racist metanarratives such as ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian incivility. Despite the appropriation of BAT SOUP’s image, the meme resonates with its audience through engaging with their ability to connect cultural and temporal knowledge to decode the meme (Milner 2018, 49-60).

[memesandcovidrhetoric]

COVID-19 and Anti-Science

COVID-19 has provided an intercultural lexicon of phrases, images, and symbols that can be used to decode memes in circulation (Pulos 2020). As memetic media expands, it operates within a framework of polyvocality while simultaneously reflecting and amplifying established interactions of power within discourses (Milner 2018, 111-113). Fringe anti-science, anti-vaccine and COVID-19-denying rhetoric have been amplified through participatory media, finding commonalities in a deep distrust of regulatory bodies and medical freedom ideologies rooted in American exceptionalism (Hotez 2021)⁹. Focusing on non-compliance, these groups have united to lobby against public health measures with significant influence on local governments (Puri, Coomes, Haghbayan, & Gunaratne 2020, 2586-2593).

Participatory media infamies these rhetorics while exposing them to social ridicule and dismissal by the scientifically literate community. Their self-marginalization due to memetic ridicule and simultaneous amplification of perspectival privilege has further polarized public health discourses. Consequently, anti-science perspectives and ideas are reappropriated for memetic mockery by dominant public discourses as seen in the anti-vaxxer meme above (Anti-Vaxxer Meme 2019). Groups have responded by endangering public health by hosting increasingly large and frequent anti-health regulation rallies in COVID-19 hotspots and raising rates of vaccine non-compliance (Puri, Coomes, Haghbayan, & Gunaratne 2020, 2586-2593). In this way, memes and participatory media complicate the ways individuals engage with the diversity of ideas (Milner 2018, 11-113), amplifying fringe rhetorics connected to metanarratives of racism and white supremacy, leading to a rise in anti-Asian violence (Sharp 2014), as seen in the Atlanta attack (Fausset, Bogel-Burroughs, & Fazio 2021).

[memesandcovidrhetoric]

Anti-Science and Whiteness

COVID-19 anti-science rhetoric is based in the fear of a racialized other, uniting with and legitimating oppressive ideologies which connect to binaric narratives of power and opposition (Lasco 2020, 1417-1429). Memetic media provides a platform to connect fears of an other to anti-science rhetoric, disseminating perspectives through memetic vehicles with previously unknown parameters of reach (Hotez 2021)⁹. Colonial and populist rhetoric have found a new home in scientificalized media, invigorating antiquated metanarratives through memetic media and its possibility for public participation. 

Anti-science communities’ proximity to dominant perspectives by virtue of their white majority contributes to the amplification of their message. In an echo chamber of participatory media that already amplifies existing systems of power, the self-marginalizing ideologies are popularized (albeit for infamy) while genuinely marginalized groups are ignored. Both types of groups experience anticipated, internalized and enacted forms of stigma (Earnshaw & Chaudoir 2009, 1160-1177). However, the enacted stigma that ideologically self-marginalizing groups experience is the consequence of their ideology, not their identity. A white anti-vaxxer can participate cohesively in public discourses so long as they avoid voicing their ideas about vaccines. Whereas a racialized person’s marginalized status is visible, fixed and not caused by their actions or opinions. 

Memetic media is the unsung hero of white supremacist, orientalist and medicalized nativist narratives that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Memes rely on their quick decodability in order for their messages to remain uninterrogated, and also to maintain their constructions as iterations of information rather than humorous manifestations of a perspective or agenda. Under the guise of polyvocality, participatory media amplifies the socially marginalized perspectives with the closest proximity to dominant systems of power. Together, ideas about COVID-19 and racist, colonial narratives communicated through memetic media continue to shape the pandemic, its outbreak narrative and cultural memory.

[memesandcovidrhetoric]

References

Anti-Vaxxer Drake Meme. November 29, 2020. BBC News. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A5BC/production/_115682424_drake-false-nc.png

Anti-Vaxxer Meme. September 12, 2019. Reddit. https://i.redd.it/cbiwp1ju15m31.png

AstraZeneca Meme. February 14, 2021. Starecat. https://starecat.com/content/wp-content/uploads/vaccines-pfizer-moderna-astrazeneca-comparison-men.jpg

Bat Soup Meme. January 24, 2020. Reddit. https://i.redd.it/gte5gzmtkrc41.jpg.

Earnshaw, V. A., & Chaudoir, S. R. (2009). From conceptualizing to measuring hiv stigma: A review of hiv stigma mechanism measures. AIDS and Behavior, 13(6), 1160-1177. doi:10.1007/s10461-009-9593-3.

Farooq, F., & Rathore, F. A. (2021). COVID-19 vaccination and the challenge Of infodemic and disinformation. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 36(10). doi:10.3346/jkms.2021.36.e78.

Fausset, R., Bogel-Burroughs, N., & Fazio, M. (2021, March 26). “8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shooting, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias”. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shooting-atlanta-acworth

Sharp, G. “ Old "Yellow Peril" Anti-Chinese Propaganda,” Sociological Images. June 20, 2014. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/06/20/old-yellow-peril-anti-chinese-posters/

Hotez, P. J. (2021). America’s deadly flirtation With antiscience and the medical freedom movement. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 131(7), 1-3. doi:10.1172/jci149072

Hotez, P. J. (2021). Anti-science kills: From Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to Accelerated attacks on US biomedicine. PLOS Biology, 19(1). doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3001068

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Mas, L. (2020, February 4). “Is Bat Soup a Delicacy in China? We Debunk a Rumour on the Origin of the Coronavirus.” The Observers: France 24. https://observers.france24.com/en/20200203-china-coronavirus-bat-soup-debunk-videos-viral-palau-indonesia

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Puri, N., Coomes, E. A., Haghbayan, H., & Gunaratne, K. (2020). Social media and vaccine hesitancy: New updates for the era of COVID-19 and globalized infectious diseases. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 16(11): 2586-2593. doi:10.1080/21645515.2020.1780846.

Tessler, H., Choi, M., and Kao, G. (2020). The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 45(4): 1-11.

Wald, P. “Introduction,” in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1-13.