Inside the Meme Wars Jeopardizing U.S. Democracy

A new book, “Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America,” explains how the “Stop the Steal” movement started online and resulted in the January 6 insurrection, using examples from Gamergate, the Occupy Wall Street movement and Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency to develop its playbook.

"Meme wars are about the struggle or battle over the definition of a situation or the definition of what it means to be on one side of an issue," book co-author Dr. Joan Donovan told The Takeaway. Donovan is the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. 

"In a lot of ways, [meme wars] are an insurgent attack on the mainstream in some way. And in that sense, the idea is to bring fringe outsider ideas into the realm of the powerful," added co-author Emily Dreyfuss, Senior Managing Editor of the Shorenstein Center's Technology and Social Change Research Project project. 

Dreyfuss and Donovan co-authored "Meme Wars" with Brian Friedberg, Senior Researcher on the Technology and Social Change Research Project.