What do you meme: General Election 2020 edition

Memes we will remember

By Katie Ward

Online culture has monumentally changed politics. Social media has the capacity to reach out to the youth and give them quizzes about who they should vote for based on their values. Everyone with a social media account has a platform to voice their opinions with little or no consequences.

And social media has the ultimate fundamentals to any election in the modern era: memes.

Political memes engage both young and old on social media and show a lighter side to politics but also informs them to a certain extent, depending on the validity and virality of the meme.

The majority of the top-notch memes from the general election 2020 can be found in the ‘twitter verse.’

Most of these memes come from the general public, but luckily political parties themselves make the decision to release memes on their social media in what can be seen as an attempt to stay ‘woke’.

Fine Gael managed to show this beautifully by releasing a meme that confused a lot of the general public. The thread of comments under this meme showed their failure of releasing a funny meme and led to a lot of backlash for trying to be ‘hip’.

A meme released by Fine Gael twitter account on February 1.

The general election may now be over but the memes have not stopped as talks as a coalition has continued to fuel the fire. There is an endless supply of memes.

Orlaith Purcell, a UCD nursing student, said: “Social media has helped me so much during the election. I couldn’t always watch the news or read articles so I used to go on my phone and I would get a lot of my information from there.”

She added: “I think everyone should know what is going on in their country and we are privileged enough to live in a democracy where we can vote. Memes can be educational and they start a conversation about politics and you can get a good group chat lit with a quality political meme.”

Here are some of our favourite and most controversial memes to date.