From meme to misinformation: when the joke is lost due to its virality

Memes, content propagated on the internet often for a humorous purpose, end up generating disinformation among users who don't know how to interpret them as a joke, due to the huge amount of information and the lack of education in networks, according to experts.

The doctor César Carballo, an emergency doctor at the Ramón y Cajal hospital in Madrid and very popular in Spain for his numerous media interventions during the covid-19 pandemic, has become a regular target of these mockery.

With each event in the country, assemblies emerge in networks that present him as an expert in the field, whether he is a volcanologist, a sunflower or an arenologist. Despite the obvious nature of the chance, some people see it as a media manipulation, in which a single man is used to express an opinion on anything.

Despite the initial satirical tone, the meme is one of the “most powerful and effective vehicles of disinformation and hate speech” and “it can end up degenerating into emotions that have nothing to do with humor,” Carmela Ríos, a journalist and social media teacher in different verification master's degrees in Spain, told AFP.

According to Ricard Castellet, a graduate in sociology and political science and head of digital transformation at the Gebro Pharma company, “Humor, sexuality and violence” are the most widely available topics.

Another common meme in the Hispanic world is the one that features the porn actor known as Jordi ENP as a scientist who made an important discovery or a doctor who died fighting covid and who, unjustly, nobody talks about. The story came to a Spanish policy that, at a regional plenary session in 2020, extended its condolences to the relatives of the deceased fake health worker.

The same phenomenon is repeated in other countries. In Brazil, former Environment Minister Ricardo Salles published a montage according to which CNN reportedly reported that President Jair Bolsonaro convinced his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, not to launch a war against Ukraine.

Salles had to point out on his networks that it was an “ironic meme” after part of his followers gave the information for certain and independent verifiers analyzed it.

The montage of the comedian Sam Hyde depicted as the “Ghost of Kiev”, a pilot who would have shot down several Russian planes, was not understood as a joke in Nigeria, far from the actor's native United States.

Another recurring meme is the one that uses the video of a one-goal celebration of English fans during Euro 2016, altering the image projected on the bar screen with another of Biden's stumbling on the stairs of an airplane.

In Germany, montages of an alleged conversation between Ricarda Lang, representative of Los Verdes, together with presenter Markus Lanz also continue to happen as true. Users add dialogue balloons to invent a fake conversation supposedly broadcast on television.

-Necessary pedagogy-

The specialists consulted by AFP agree that pedagogical work is needed for society to manage the enormous amount of information it faces daily on the internet.

Carmela Ríos warned that “we are often not aware as citizens of the way daily shipments of memes that ridicule a person pass before us. In the end, this phenomenon ends up altering the perception of some people.”

“There is a kind of illiteracy: everyone uses networks, but no one has taught us how to use them. That's why it's so easy for misinformation to circulate,” argued Xavier Ribes, professor of audiovisual communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Some people believe that content published on the internet has already “been previously validated” and “don't understand the age of misinformation in which we live,” added Castellet, who believes that platforms “need to establish more verification controls.”

In addition, in his opinion, content sent privately is given “blind credibility”.

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