Technology columnist/reporter Kevin Roose made Monday’s New York Times with “Business Is Buzzing Again for the Meme Makers of the Left,” thanks to Kamala Harris’s emergence as the all-but-guaranteed Democratic candidate for president.
Roose is notorious for his years of stories nudging social media platforms toward anti-conservative censorship. But on Monday he voiced no concerns or calls to monitor “misinformation under the guise of comedy” -- which is how Roose described the harmless Christian conservative satire site The Babylon Bee.
Instead, it’s all friendly fun and games and high-energy cheerleading for the left-wing Harris.
Last Sunday, after President Biden announced he was stepping down from his presidential campaign and endorsing Kamala Harris as his replacement, Democratic meme makers rejoiced.
One cheer for Roose for actually dropping left-wing labels into his celebratory reporting, something the paper has been historically loath to do.
Minutes after the announcement, a group chat called “Rebel Alliance” -- made up of left-wing creators who got to know one another during the 2020 campaign -- lit up with excited messages.
“All the progressive meme warriors are giddy right now,” said John Sellers, a co-founder of The Other 98 Percent, a popular left-wing Facebook page with 7.1 million followers, who participated in the chat.
There’s “genuine excitement” about Ms. Harris among liberal creators, he said, “whereas with Biden we were trying to manufacture excitement from vapor.”
Roose celebrated presidential candidate Harris as a living meme.
They agreed that Ms. Harris’s passionate online fandom -- jokingly known as the KHive -- had already boosted their engagement, sending clicks and views to a steady stream of coconut tree memes, Kamala is “brat” references and posts drawing a sharp contrast between Ms. Harris’s record as a former prosecutor and Mr. Trump’s criminal convictions.
Efforts like Roose’s to patrol acceptable conservative political discourse may have unwittingly hurt the left as well.
The recent struggles of the online left aren’t entirely Mr. Biden’s fault. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has purposefully de-emphasized political content since 2020, showing fewer partisan posts to users in an attempt to lower the temperature on its platforms and avoid criticism of its content moderation efforts. And X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, has transformed under Elon Musk’s ownership into a launchpad for right-wing influencers, while some liberal voices have decamped to smaller, more insular platforms like Threads and Bluesky.
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The creators I spoke to offered lots of caveats about the tenuous link between online popularity and electoral success. TikToks and Reels don’t vote, and Mr. Trump is still a slight favorite in many polls. Swing-state independents won’t necessarily be swayed by coconut tree memes, just as most of them were indifferent (at best) to the frog memes and YouTube supercuts that accompanied Mr. Trump’s first campaign in 2016.
Roose was certainly avid about cracking down on a medium that supposedly doesn’t have much electoral influence!
He found an electoral bright side for Harris.
But the chaotic, excited energy swirling around Ms. Harris matters, creators argue, because it reflects the sentiment of younger voters, and helps her campaign see which messages are resonating with them. It could also help with fund-raising, lead to better attendance at campaign rallies and bolster get-out-the-vote efforts.
