Key themes
The political origins of internet meme culture. The conversation begins with the observation that while memes are often dismissed as culturally insignificant, they have become "bedrock to the strategy of conspirators and extremists." Rather than starting with a "great man" narrative of technology history, Donovan frames meme culture as its own object of study—a way to understand how people use technology to change politics.
Occupy Wall Street as the first broad-based mimetic movement. Donovan identifies Occupy Wall Street (2011) as the first large-scale U.S. social movement leveraging hashtags and memes as coordinating mechanisms. Occupy demonstrated that social media could function as both a communication and resource-sharing tool for distributed organizing. However, this "first-mover advantage" was quickly co-opted: the same infrastructure attracted far-right actors including Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and Andrew Breitbart, who recognized the organizing potential of meme-based campaigns.
Gamergate, the alt-right, and the MAGA movement as a pipeline. Donovan traces a lineage: during Gamergate (2014), media manipulation tactics were tested at scale; alt-right celebrities like Richard Spencer, Baked Alaska, and Milo Yiannopoulos emerged; these figures then became "social media hype men" for the MAGA movement, creating a coalition between libertarian, white-nationalist, and populist factions. By 2020, this "uncomfortable coalition" fractured—Trump had not delivered on promises of mass deportation and a wall; far-right actors felt he had been "softened" by government and was controlled by the "Deep State."
Stop the Steal: the maturation of incitement. The Stop the Steal meme exemplifies the culmination of this history. Roger Stone registered the domain "stopthesteal.com" in 2015, anticipating Trump's primary would be "stolen." In 2020, when millions felt outraged at the election result, the pre-existing meme and narrative were deployed at scale. Donovan distinguishes between mobilization (getting people to act on genuine grievances) and incitement (using the same mechanisms to push people toward illegal action). Social media platforms amplified Stop the Steal without friction, functioning as "boomboxes" cranking up the volume on divisive content.
Meme characteristics and virality. Donovan explains that effective memes are anonymous, participatory, sticky, and transgressive—they invite remix and remixing. This is why Hillary Clinton's straightforward #ImWithHer campaign performed poorly against Trump's Pepe memes: memes require an ironic or transgressive twist. Donovan and Nonnecke discuss how memes as slogans (three-word phrases like "lock her up," "build the wall," "jobs not mobs") have extraordinary stickiness in advertising and politics.
The role of platform design and content moderation. Nonnecke and Donovan discuss how social media platforms have structural incentives to maximize engagement rather than accuracy. Platforms claim to police hateful content but in practice deploy only a skeleton crew of content moderators ("two patrol officers monitoring thousands of miles of highway") while reporting inflated statistics to Congress. The fundamental problem is that the "product is the problem"—algorithmic amplification of outrage is what generates ad revenue. Donovan argues that de-platforming is one of the few interventions that actually changes behavior, because access to the public through social media is manipulators' most valuable asset.
Memes on the left vs. the right. When asked whether the left uses memes as effectively, Donovan argues the answer is yes, but left-wing meme culture works differently. The left's greatest meme of the past decade is "Black Lives Matter"—a three-word phrase that carries meaning, has endured, and mobilized real action. Donovan also cites "all conservatives are Nazis" and "the Big Lie" as left-wing memes. However, left-wing meme culture tends to be less campaign-driven and less consciously coordinated. The most successful memes online tend to be transgressive (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic); the left struggles with meme warfare partly because it relies on irony and offense to go viral.
Interventions: what individuals and journalists can do. Rather than sharing outrageous content to denounce it (which amplifies it), Donovan recommends screenshotting and explaining why content is harmful to audiences who will listen. Journalists should avoid going live with extremists, should not hyperlink to manifestos, and should practice ethical restraint. Certain topics (suicide methods, mass-murderer manifestos) are too dangerous to report on without strict editorial guidelines. For organized disinformation, academic researchers have a responsibility to audit platforms, not take them at their word about self-regulation.
Specific historical and cultural references
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Trayvon Martin case and "Trayvoning." Donovan discusses how the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 sparked an online meme called Trayvoning—young people posing as dead children—that normalized violence while appearing to mock the media. This moment was the "red pilling" of white young men who felt confused or attacked by racial justice discourse.
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The "woke" meme war. Donovan traces the word "woke" from its origins in Black and queer subcultures (2011–2012) through its adoption by Ferguson protesters (2014–2015) to its current weaponization by the right as a term for cultural-Marxist villainy. This demonstrates how meaning-making around a single word becomes a proxy for broader political conflict.
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Dark MAGA and astroturfing. Donovan describes a failed attempt to engineer "Dark MAGA" (a darker, more violent version of MAGA) using Grease memes on 4chan. The community quickly identified it as "a plant," demonstrating that successful memes cannot be entirely top-down; they require organic adoption and ironic participation.
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Reddit's The_Donald and the #DraftOurDaughters campaign. Political operatives created memes pairing Hillary Clinton's logo with
#DraftOurDaughtersand#DraftMyWifehashtags, then circulated them as if from Clinton supporters. Content moderators in the Philippines, looking for boobs and gore, couldn't detect the disinformation. This shows how meme-based campaigns exploit the gaps between content moderation and actual context.
Notes
This talk, recorded at UC Berkeley in 2024 or later (exact date not specified on video), captures Donovan in her role as a leading public scholar on media manipulation and online extremism. The framing of memes as politically consequential represents a shift from earlier internet culture studies that dismissed memes as ephemeral humor toward a research-based understanding of meme-based organizing as genuine infrastructure for coordinated campaigns. Donovan's central argument—that the same mechanisms enabling pro-social movement organizing also enable incitement when amplified by platforms with attention-maximizing algorithms—cuts across the left-right divide and implicates platform business models as much as individual bad actors.
The discussion of content moderation, de-platforming, and researcher responsibility reflects post-2020 scholarship on platform governance. Nonnecke's policy perspective (coming from Goldman School and Berkeley Law) complements Donovan's empirical analysis, grounding the talk in regulatory frameworks and systemic solutions rather than individual interventions.