Anytime remember when memes used to be used strictly as form of entertainment?  Those of us that have been around remember favorites like the Zero Wing “All Your Base Are Belong to Us,” Ermahgerd, Overly Attached Girlfriend, etc.  Sites like 4Chan were never-ending sources of new and old material (usually old).  But everyone was in on the joke – we all knew it was meant to be funny, not facts.

At the time if this writing, we are in the middle of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic where the Delta variant is kicking our collective asses.  Vaccines and measures like masking and distancing are available, but anti-vax and anti-mask mentality is higher than it should be, and much of it can be traced back to some meme as the source. 

One of the signs of reliable information sources is when someone is not afraid to cite them (PubMed, Justia, FindLaw, Google Scholar, CDC, WHO, JISC/CORE, Statista, etc.)  But when someone’s source is/was a meme on a questionable site somewhere, they are often unwilling to cite that source, change the subject, or disparage other sources: “lol you trust the data coming from the cdc?“

Today memes are dangerous weapons of misinformation and/disinformation.  Meaningful discussion about things like SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, vaccines, variants, your immune system, etc., requires using science-y words that might sound scary and the topics involved may not be well understood by everyone.  (You may find that those that talk about not living in fear, are actually living in fear of science.)

Sometimes the complexity of scientific topics is in itself a problem and can lead to misunderstandings.  That is another reason memes are so dangerous – they are bite-sized pieces of information (often wrong) that are written using simple language and/or use simple pictures, which makes them easier to understand by less educated and/or lesser skilled people, and are surprisingly easy to share on social media.

After all, it is easier to share an image than to compose a post that makes cogent arguments and/or clearly expresses your point of view on something.  Why go through the trouble of writing about your doubts regarding the efficacy of masking when you take into account the different types of masks available and that people do not know how to don/doff them correctly, when instead you can just repost gems like this:

(Oh, and BTW, your “friend” is an idiot – the disease is called “COVID-19,” not “covid.”)

George Carlin famously said:

“Never Underestimate The Power Of Stupid People In Large Groups.” 

We have the dangerous combination of the above mentioned large groups combined with the abundance of simplistic memes out there.