The Daily Beast: People are Already Making Deepfake Videos of Trump’s Arrest. “Newswatchers don’t have to wait for real images of Donald Trump in handcuffs—deepfakes are already flooding social media thanks to artificial intelligence technology that lets any hoaxer pose as a breaking news photographer.”
Rolling Stone: How Kevin Hart Reaction Memes Took Over the Internet. “You can’t deny the hustle: Hart consistently ranks among the highest-paid comedians, collaborates with big names on high-profile movie projects and, through his two separate production companies, maintains a dizzying number of partnerships and development deals. Oh, and last year, he launched a tequila brand. The upshot of all this labor is that Hart is more than famous — he’s omnipresent, perhaps one of the most recognizable faces in American culture today. Which helps to explain how he became a meme.”
Bloomberg: Memes, tweets, snark are the FDA’s new public health weapons. “Since [Dr. Robert] Califf took over a year ago, the FDA has set its sights on social-media disinformation as a public-health scourge. The agency’s efforts started with some savvy responses to pandemic misinformation cropping up on Twitter. Now a crew of agency employees creates memes and other content and feeds them into the internet to defend science.”
Mashable: What if ChatGPT was a cat?. “ChatGPT, the online artificial chatbot taking the world by storm, is being used for a lot, including messaging Tinder matches and writing essays. It was only a matter of time before replicas and chatbot spin-offs trickled our way. One such AI asks: what if ChatGPT was a cat?”
University of Cambridge: Memes-field Park? ‘Digital natives’ are flirting with Jane Austen’s vision of the ideal man all over again. “In a newly-published analysis, literature specialists examined the phenomenon of internet memes about Jane Austen and her fictional creations, in particular those from Pride and Prejudice and, above all, Mr Darcy. Austen’s work is ‘memed’ – turned into bite-sized, ironic snippets of online content – more than almost any other author of classic fiction.”
Michigan Daily: Nichetok/Corecore: TikTok’s trendy nihilistic echo chamber. “Calling someone ‘scenecore’ is the same as saying ‘you look scene’ in an adapted, chronically online way. There exist dozens of these -core terms, creating an almost absurd amount of micro-niche aesthetics and tastes. So now that we understand the -core suffix, what does ‘corecore’ mean? What does it look like? The answer is rather simple: Its purpose seems to be against this hyper-specific trend culture. It doesn’t fit any defined look or aesthetic, it just exists to compile feelings.”
TMZ: POPEYES MEME KID: I’M A COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYER!!! … Wants NIL Deal. “Remember the TerRio look-alike who went viral for giving the side-eye at Popeyes??? That kid from the famous meme is now a college football player — and we’re all officially old. TMZ Sports has confirmed … Lake Erie College freshman offensive lineman Dieunerst Collin is, in fact, the little kid in the yellow shirt who became internet famous on now-defunct social media platform Vine back in the day.”
BuzzFeed News: We Spoke To Twitter Troll Juniper About Manufacturing Moral Panics, Creating “Goblin Mode,” And Dealing With Elon Musk. “June, who uses both she and they pronouns, is a 27-year-old from Wisconsin. By day, they work in quality control in the food industry. By night, they are one of our nation’s leading shitposters. She started her account in 2020 to support Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, but quickly found it more cathartic to just make fun of her political enemies.”
Variety: Kanye West’s Massive Reddit Page Overtaken by Taylor Swift Appreciation, Holocaust Awareness Content as Fans Abandon Him. “Following the 45-year-old’s appearance on right-wing talk show host Alex Jones’ ‘Infowars’ on Thursday, where he continued to spew anti-Semitic rhetoric and deliberately gave praise to Adolf Hitler and Nazis, fans on the artist’s r/Kanye Reddit page, which has more than 700,000 subscribers, have decided to turn the subreddit into a Taylor Swift appreciation page.” There seems to be a bit of a war going on the subreddit at the moment.
Hongkiat: 9 Best Tools to Optimize Animated GIFs. “Animated GIFs are interesting and all, but the time taken to load the are not. Because they consist of frames of animations, they are usually big in terms of file size. This means it is a pain to load web pages, especially if you have many of them. But the good news is, Animated GIFs can be optimized. In other words, their file size can be shrunk without compromising the image quality.”
L’officiel: Art Memes: How the Message Satirizes the Medium. “Whether it’s an image macro, a video clip, or turn of phrase, the meme plays by no one’s rules—and certainly not the establishment’s. There’s plenty of marketing department TikTok propaganda, of course, but the good stuff is organically formed: funny and subversive, often contextually inappropriate and anti-aesthetic simply by nature.”
Teen Vogue: John Fetterman and Social Media: How His Campaign Built a Winning Strategy. “If you’ve been entertained by Senator-elect John Fetterman’s social media presence and trolling of his Trump-backed opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz, you partly have Sophie Ota to thank. At 26, Ota serves as the digital director of Fetterman for PA, a campaign that has harnessed the power of humor and authenticity to set a new standard for the use of social media in politics — and managed to flip a Senate seat in purple Pennsylvania.”
The Conversation: From GameStop to crypto: how to protect yourself from meme stock mania. “Recent rallies in stocks popularised on social media have attracted increasing numbers of investors looking to these so-called ‘meme stocks’ for quick returns. But while it might look like a fun game, there are real risks to investing in stocks and other financial products popularised on social media. And with recessions looming around the world, the danger is becoming even more acute.”
Michigan Daily: The Queen is dead, long live the memes. “Social media is engineered to get you to feel strong emotions and see controversial opinions so that you continue to engage with their app, and yeah, the Queen’s passing seems to have elicited a few strong emotions, to say the least. While there may be some serious discussion potential on the privilege of the royal family and the unfixed damage of the British empire, most likely the closest we’ll get is quite a few ver hearty ‘RIP bozo’s.”
Poynter: How memes can fuel political strategy. “Memes, like jokes, are often depicted as mostly harmless and incapable of exerting political influence. But recent elections have demonstrated organizers can easily leverage them to build political movements, spread group narratives and influence voters.”
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