Meme 2020

Submission 2,377

Part of a series on 2020 United States Presidential Election. [View Related Entries]

About

Meme 2020 is a collective of social media creators, designers, influencers and staticisticans that creates political memes. While the group considers itself politically moderate, the campaign has thus far produced memes that are critical of the Trump and hopes to sway voters away from re-electing him in the 2020 presidential election. Mick Purzycki, the CEO of Jerry Media, founded Meme 2020.

History

Bloomberg Campaign

On February 7th, The Daily Beast^[5] reported that the Mike Bloomberg campaign reached out to influencers to "make him look cool." On February 12th, 2020, several high-profile meme accounts on Instagram, including FuckJerry, ^[1] Sonny5ideup, ^[2] shitheadsteve^[3] and others posted images sponsored by Democratic Presidential candidate and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (shown below). These posts were all fake text conversations showing Bloomberg approaching the accounts to do sponsored content and the accounts appearing to mock the proposal. All the posts included that they were sponsored by Bloomberg in the caption (examples shown below).

The New York Times^[4] reported that the campaign was helmed by Meme 2020, which was founded by Mick Purzycki, chief executive of Jerry Media.

Vote By Mail Campaign

On July 29th, 2020, Meme2020 launched a "Vote By Mail" campaign on variation Instagram pages. These memes used the Text from FBI format to encourage followers to signup for mail-ballots. For example, that day, @tank.sinatra ^[6] posted a variation of the meme to feature a reference to the Netflix docu-series Tiger King. The post received more than 57,000 likes in less than 24 hours (shown below, left). Throughout the day, other accounts, including @shitheadsteve^[7] and @sonny5ideup,^[8] shared variations of meme (examples below, center and right).

That day, the New York Times^[9] published a report on Meme 2020 and the new campaign. In the article, Purzycki described their approach:

We found that memes that were intended to be explicitly anti-Trump weren’t as persuasive as those that weren’t so explicit. People have become so good at identifying when the voice of the meme feels like it’s coming from the left, and it forces the right to entrench. Memes that are cloaked in a way to slightly make fun of the left first, then lean into a hard critique of Trump, end up moving both moderates and Republicans in the intended direction.