A sample of memes from far-right communities like Britain First, Sos racisme anti-blanc, Meninist Posts, 4chan, r/The_Donald, and United Patriots Front
Facebook / Reddit / 4chan / BuzzFeed
On December 17, 2013, Facebook announced that videos on your News Feed would start autoplaying. They would mute on default and, at the end of the video, it’d have a carousel featuring related videos you might want to watch. A few days later, on Christmas Day, rugby player Ross Samson uploaded a video from his family home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He looked into his cell phone camera and said, “I nominate all of you whose birthday it’s not. Merry Christmas," and then downed a bottle of beer in one gulp. It went viral and inspired the “neck and nominate” meme, which would eventually be known as “neknominate.”
The meme was a video chain letter. Once you were nominated, you’d have to chug a full bottle of beer on camera, and then nominate someone else — bros icing bros for the social video age. Things eventually spiraled out of control as people tried to one-up each other. By February 2014, at least five people had died in what were believed to be neknominate-related deaths.
If the neknominate mechanics sound familiar, it’s because it laid the groundwork for something much larger that appeared only a few months later: the Ice Bucket Challenge. After the neknominate craze, the meme grammar of video nominations floated around on social media for a while, largely participated in by athletes and sports fans.
Chris Kennedy, a golfer from Sarasota, Florida, was nominated in July 2014. Kennedy did the Ice Bucket Challenge, uploaded it on YouTube, tweeted it, and nominated his friend Jeanette Senerchia, whose husband was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Senerchia posted a video response on her Facebook in what appears to be the explosive moment when ALS charities, the act of dumping ice water on yourself, and Facebook’s autoplaying video feature swirled together into a perfect storm. Over the summer of 2014, more than 2.4 million Ice Bucket Challenge videos were shared on Facebook and ALS charities received close to $100 million in donations.
From left: Ross Samson posting the first "neck and nominate" video, Chris Kennedy nominating Jeanette Senerchia for the Ice Bucket Challenge, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau participating in the meme several weeks later.
Ross Samson / Chris Kennedy / Dan Riedlhuber / Reuters
Some monumental things happened in global politics that year. The far-right UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain grabbed enough votes to gain major-party status for the first time. France’s far-right party, the National Front, pulled off a historic win and went from a fringe conservative movement to a serious political force. In the US, the tea party had successfully altered the Republican Party. That summer, the tea party unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Later in the same year, ISIS announced a new massive media outlet that planned to use social media, particularly videos, as an aggressive recruitment tool. A culture shift was happening that we are only now seeing the effects of.
The sheer size of the impact of a meme like the Ice Bucket Challenge was the first big indication that Facebook had drastically changed the structure of popular culture. Two years later, we are finally beginning to see the consequences of this all around the world.
Donald Trump will enter the White House in January, Britain has voted to leave the EU, and ultra-conservative politician Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency in the Philippines. And before the end of next year, Austria, France, and Italy might be electing their own nationalist, populist, anti-EU leaderships. That leaves Angela Merkel as one of the few centrist, pro-EU politicians left in western Europe, just as the far-right Alternative for Germany party under the control of Frauke Petry continues to grow steadily.
Although it would be simplistic to hang the global surge of nationalism and far-right thinking on Facebook’s algorithms alone, it is undeniable how fast these nationalist far-right political movements are growing, thanks to some key changes Facebook made to its News Feed in 2014.
Two years ago, Facebook announced that it was tweaking the algorithm, ironically, in an effort to defeat clickbait, to favor things like time spent on your News Feed. That meant comments and engagement mattered more than they used to, which meant content that favored identity became even more valuable. It was a watershed moment for Facebook’s ecosystem — its first aggressive step toward resembling apps like Instagram and Snapchat.
According to the New York Times this week, top-level executives at Facebook are just now beginning to consider the role they played in Trump’s presidential victory. Mark Zuckerberg initially described the idea that the fake news currently being shared in huge numbers across its network impacted the election as a “pretty crazy idea.” So there’s a good chance that Facebook’s higher-ups didn’t actually consider what this algorithmic tweak would actually mean in the long run.
Left: a meme from the UK-based Britain First Facebook page celebrating Trump's win and Brexit. Right: a meme from a French page called "Sos racisme anti-blanc" or "S.O.S. anti-white racism." In the picture, Donald Trump says, "It's your turn, Marine," to which Marine Le Pen replies, "OK, Trump, I'm coming!"
Britain First / Sos racisme anti-blanc
Polarized online spaces in the West like Anonymous, Gamergate, and the men’s rights movement have a single root: frustrated young men who think their place in the society is shrinking. These fringe movements would eventually break through, hit Facebook, go mainstream, and spread around the world.
At the same time, male-driven online communities typically used for sharing memes are mobilizing politically. In the UK, football “banter” culture — which has long held an unspoken connection to racism and sexism — or meme pages like Meninist Posts act as a gateway that can lead young men to more radical alt-right figures like Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos, or Facebook pages more closely aligned with traditional right-wing ideology, like Britain First. Yiannopoulos positioned himself as an early bridge between Gamergate, men’s rights activists, anti-EU sentiment, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Yiannopoulos and his followers realized that Trump’s “Make America Great Again" could be abbreviated as #MAGA, a hashtag that has been used in the UK primarily by British lads to abbreviate Magaluf, a Spanish island resort popular for clubbing. There are currently rumors swirling that Yiannopoulos is being considered for press secretary.
But this connection between burgeoning far-right movements and toxic masculinity is happening everywhere. France has racist meme pages, and Florian Philippot, one of the five party vice presidents acting under the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen, has a real Milo Yiannopoulos vibe to him. It also has its own Breibart-like far-right mouthpiece called Fdesouche. In Russia, isolated young men post memes on conservative VK pages and then go on to join the pro-Putin troll farms that dominate Russian media. Australia has a constellation of anti-immigration Facebook groups that connect Australian nationalism and male empowerment, the most notorious being United Patriots Front. Even Japan’s increasingly conservative government is aided by the neto-uyo, an anonymous army of right-wing nationalist trolls who attack anyone who criticizes the government.
Writer Siyanda Mohutsiwa summed up this global phenomenon succinctly in a recent Twitter thread about white male radicalization. “These college-educated young men were then ripe enough to be sold [the] idea that Trump represented a return to Men Being Real Men,” Mohutsiwa wrote. “They are told that feminism is why they can't get girlfriends, that ‘feminization’ of schools is why they didn't do well in high school.”
But their memes have appeal and the most viral ones go mainstream. Their Facebook pages get bigger. Algorithms identify that a user likes one particular page and suggest others, creating an echo-chamber effect that can lead to some pretty scary places. For instance, after a user likes the Australian United Patriots Front page, Facebook suggests more pages to like, such as the National Democratic Party of Australia and Stop The Mosque In Narre Warren. The Britain First page lists Christian Fightback News and Donald Trump as pages you should like next. Facebook’s recommendation engines appear to promote political ideology like any other kind of content, pushing users even deeper.
BuzzFeed News reached out to Facebook to ask whether or not it has safeguards in place for users who become radicalized. At the time of publishing, Facebook has not responded.
A perfect example of this meme gateway is the confounding evolution of Pepe the Frog. Originally created by artist Matt Furie in 2005, the good-natured cartoon frog traveled the dark corners of the internet for almost a decade, mutating and being remixed, though usually staying an apolitical mascot for communities like Reddit and 4chan. When America’s alt-right rose out of those messageboards, Pepe the Frog came with them. Pepe was adapted by far-right trolls into grotesque depictions of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. The most viral examples of those memes broke through the Facebook bubble — and thus popular culture — in such a major way that Hillary Clinton’s website had to write an explainer.
Hossein Derakhshan, known as the "Blogfather" of Iran