Memes and symbolic violence: #proudboys and the use of memes for propaganda and the construction of collective identity

ABSTRACT

As a social media platform, Instagram has a strong influence on youth culture, identity, and perceptions of the world, with the application serving not only for youth to follow accounts that are aspirational but also for entertainment and identity building through memes. Meme accounts that are explicitly conservative and that espouse white supremacist, hateful ideology and subsequently, identity, are incredibly prevalent. Media serve as powerful institutions for the socialization of youth, and content on the platform reveals that memes are serving as building blocks of ideological meaning. This study conducted a discourse analysis of the memes and content circulated by the alt-right affiliate movement the ‘Proud Boys,’ which is being sold to young men as a fraternity-like organization to celebrate ‘Western ideals’. Proud Boys operate on an ideology that consists of both symbolic and physical violence, and the popularity of these groups is growing. Using Bourdieu’s work on language as a framework, this article is an exploration to their recruitment and world-building practices on Instagram using memes and will be necessary to understand the movement, and to gain further insight into how memes are being used as propaganda.

KEYWORDS:

• Memes
• Instagram
• extremism
• identity
• social media
• proud boys

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Julia R. DeCook is a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University in the Information and Media PhD program. Her work concerns extremist movements, disinformation and propaganda, and knowledge production strategies in online spaces.

Notes

1 https://github.com/rarcega/instagram-scraper; this scraper no longer works after changes to Instagram’s API in 2018.

2 The “OK” hand symbol being a symbol of the alt right and the Proud Boys began as a “prank” on the web forum 4chan to convince the mainstream media that it was now a hate symbol in order to prove the gullibility of the media and the left, and has now been adopted a legitimate symbol of the group (Anti-Defamation League n.d.).