Harmful and Helpful Memes

Harmful Meme

The image in this Instagram meme is from the intro cutscene to Sonic CD, in which the character is searching for something over the horizon. The meme states that the original poster (OP for short) is struggling to find a hug for an individual they deem physically unattractive, suggesting that they use appearance that lines up with their aesthetic preferences as a prerequisite for showing kindness to another human being. The hug isn’t necessarily meant to represent the literal act of hugging someone – after all, hugging is physical contact, which requires consent. Instead, the hug this meme refers to is a figurative representation of any friendly or kind gesture, or friendship itself. OP is suggesting that if you don’t follow the conventional standards of what’s attractive or not, or don’t match what they themselves consider attractive, then you’re not deserving of any kindness or meaningful human interaction.

I had originally clicked on this meme when it appeared in my feed because I like the game series that the image is from, and I’ve enjoyed plenty of memes made by people who like the same series. However, when I got a closer look at the message, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of distaste. I used to struggle with maintaining a positive body image when I was a teenager, because I used to be picked on by some people who were close to me for certain aspects of how I look, such as my weight and my acne. When I look at this post, I worry that another young person with body confidence struggles may stumble across it and take its message to heart, which would exacerbate any anxiety and shame they may already feel.

Helpful Meme

In this meme, I have used the same image that the original harmful meme did to deliver a more positive message. Instead of going for a completely wholesome meme – one with a gentle and compassionate tone at the expense of the sardonic humor memes tend to express – I tried to make it from the perspective of someone assertively defending a friend who’s being judged for their appearance. The meme expresses that someone should feel free to wear whatever outfit they feel comfortable in regardless of their body shape, friends should stick up for friends, and picking on someone for how they look is generally a foolish thing to do in a social context. Another important statement the meme makes is that people’s preferences for attraction tend to be subjective, so trying to quantify how good someone looks or state beauty as an objective fact is not possible, hence “bro’s statement is baseless.”

Social media sites tend to have a bias toward content that may upset people, as people are more willing to comment on something that makes them feel angry than one that makes them feel happy. In maintaining the “mean” humor of most memes on the surface, this positive meme is designed to trick algorithms on sites like Instagram into thinking that it’s a negative meme with a large potential for virality, which would earn it more traction on people’s recommended feeds.

Rewiring Meme Culture and Social Media to Promote the Positive

While using tonal camouflage to disguise a well-intentioned meme as an ill-intentioned is one route to spreading positive messages online, it may not work well in the long term. This could earn the meme attention, but many of the comments it earns could be negative, as some users will not be convinced that the meme’s purpose is truly noble. It would be helpful for social media companies to hold themselves accountable and reverse their usual methods of garnering virality – pushing uplifting content to users over the kind that stirs negative emotions- but the potential loss of engagement-related revenue from such a big move may cause them to shy away from it. What social media users can do at the moment is deliberately spread positive content without letting the algorithm intimidate them, by making entire accounts dedicated to posting it, and by manually sending it to the people they know via messages to boost their engagement the old-fashioned way.

One good example of a positive-posting account on Instagram in particular is Good News Dog, which seeks to counteract the flood of bad news people are bombarded with by posting several positive new stories to their page. Instead of endless stories about political tension and horrible deeds, visitors to the page will find much happier reflections of reality, such as a woman’s elderly neighbor delivering a cake to someone who just moved in as a welcome present or a single father adopting a child with Down syndrome.

Sources:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C0Z0RrrImmU/?igsh=MXVsYm9oZnUxM2NpYwhttps://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wholesome

https://www.instagram.com/goodnewsdog/?hl=en