Published on November 6, 2024 3:27 PM GMT
I’m going to describe a phenomenon that’s likely very obvious, but nevertheless I think it’s worth documenting because I’ve noticed it more and more. I’ll refer to it as Meme Talking Points, and the first instance I noticed this was based on my conversation on the Ray Epps conspiracy theory earlier this year. My interlocutor brought up the case of Ricky Vaughn as evidence that conservatives were uniquely targeted by the legal justice system, expressing surprise that I wasn’t familiar with the case. He then sought to bring me up to speed by claiming that Ricky Vaughn was “arrested for posting memes”.
I thought that was a curious way of describing Vaughn’s case, because I was familiar enough with the story to know there was more to it. Then I noticed the exact same talking point (“prosecuted for posting memes”) come up elsewhere in a debate with Destiny and John Doyle (timestamped: “they dox people, arrest them for memes such as Ricky Vaughn”), and most recently as a comment by Simon Laird.
If you’re unaware, Vaughn posted a fake 2016 Hilary Clinton campaign ad that implored her voters to cast their votes by tweeting.
Vaughn was then prosecuted under a relatively obscure Reconstruction Era law from 1870 which criminalizes “conspiring against rights”. He was convicted in 2023 and sentenced to 7 months. There’s plenty about Vaughn’s case you could argue about, such as whether this was intended as a joke or as an earnest attempt to mislead voters, or whether his conduct should nevertheless be protected by the first amendment, or whether his case was an example of selective prosecution. All those points are perfectly fair game for debate, but they’re impossible to unearth if you describe his case as “posting memes” rather than the much less ambiguous “posting fake and misleading Hilary Clinton campaign ads”.
The obfuscation has to be intentional. You can consider this a manifestation of Scott Alexander’s noncentral fallacy or my own revision I named the sticker shortcut fallacy. To describe the obvious, absent any additional information or context, the phrase “posting memes” conjures up a thoroughly banal activity. The prototypical example you might then think of would be someone getting sent to federal prison for posting the jealous girlfriend meme.
Such a scenario would be inherently compelling because it describes unusual and outrageous events that inevitably command curiosity. Are you serious? You can go to prison for the fun things I do with my friends? By contrast, this hook would be completely absent if you instead encounter “posting fake and misleading Hilary Clinton campaign ads”. The scenario described could still end up being outrageous but the key difference is that its bare description doesn’t make it immediately so. There’s no risk of someone reading that statement and worrying they’ll be prosecuted for the fun things they do with friends (unless, of course, their social circle regularly traffics in fake campaign ads) and that means its emotional impact is deadened.
I’m using a right-wing example to illustrate my point, but this isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to one political side. Any statement — more specifically, any slogan — which conveys incomplete information and whose ambiguity prompts an outrage reaction, would fit what I’m describing. Examples from the left (which you may or may not agree with, litigating these is not the point of this essay) could be Freddie DeBoer’s essay arguing that any logical inconsistences within transgender ideology should be quieted with the mantra “be kind”. Or the insistence from activists to label Israel’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide. In each instance, while you lose information conveyed by compressing the information packet into a bite-sized slogan, the moral imperative remains intact during transmission (kindness is good, and genocide is bad). Without a legitimate explanation for the ambiguity, you can presume the resulting vagueness is strategic.
You can condemn this as dishonest parlor tricks but it has logic. If I am correct in accurately identifying this phenomenon, and accurately gauging its increasing prominence, it’s probably due to an effective trade-off. What the meme talking point loses in information conveyance, the smaller information packet might increase its contagious transmission. Further, the meme talking point presents itself as a clearcut moral parable, and that likely increases its ability to leave an emotionally salient imprint upon the casual reader.
All that to say is that while this is all very frustrating to deal with, it’ll probably continue increasing in prevalence. You can blame it on greater social media immersion and the ethereal way we glom onto information, and maybe our cultural institutions just haven’t caught up yet.
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