#124: Masters of the political dark arts
The Meme-ification of politics
lol hey guys,
you are reading another quick edition of Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. I am an internet researcher at HAW Hamburg, Germany. Today i try to unwrap the latest meme-infused step of the Biden-Harris campaign to conquer TikTok with a dedicated account. The implications – as previous US election campaigns have shown – will most likely become prevalent in other campaigns abroad, e.g. the European parliamentary election 2024. We talk about:
🏎️ Let's Go Brandon
🦇 Dark Brandon
🕵️ Just like we drew it up
President Joe Biden is officially on TikTok. In the middle of the Super Bowl on Sunday (Feb, 11), the Biden campaign announced that it had joined the platform (Wired).
Joining TikTok is a sharp pivot for the Biden re-election campaign, which had officially maintained that it didn’t need its own TikTok account to reach voters and that it would work through influencers instead (New York Times). Compare: Democrats built an influencer economy. Can it save Joe Biden? (Semafor).
🐸 Memetic Literacy
Biden campaign advisers cite an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem as one of the main reasons the campaign finally joined the platform (Wired). It is as well the latest proof for the meme-ification of politics (New Yorker). Or as Idil Galip, lecturer in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam who runs the Meme Studies Research Network writes:
“Online visibility and virality is becoming, if it has not already, the most valuable aim for a digital propaganda campaign. Memetic templates are the main element of virality on social media platforms, and this makes it clear that building memetic literacy will play a key part in being politically informed moving forward.”
Biden’s team has leaned hard into memes in attempts to connect with young people (Washington Post) with Biden’s first TikTok simultaneously pokes fun at multiple right-wing conspiracy theories (Yahoo). Galip: Propagandistic actors need to be knowledgeable about online communities and community identities, meme templates and digital culture as memes serve as the “the lingua franca of the internet”.
So what the heck is going on on Biden’s TikTok account? Let’s unwrap layers of meaning. Why Brandon? Why Dark?
🏎️ Let's Go Brandon
Let's Go Brandon refers to a viral video of NASCAR racer Brandon Brown speaking to NBC about winning the NASCAR Xfinity Series while the crowd chants "f'*ck Joe Biden," which the newscaster claims is a chant of "let's go Brandon" instead, seemingly as a form of damage control. The video went viral in October 2021 following numerous reports of people chanting "f*ck Joe Biden" at sports events began surfacing (Know Your Meme).
As usual with memes it got applied, modified and adjusted various times and while in September 2022, the phrase was used to mock Biden and compare him to Adolf Hitler (New Yorker), during the 2023 White House Correspondents Dinner Biden himself acknowledged the meme (Extra TV) and Biden's 2024 re-election campaign has embraced the persona (Vox).
🦇 Dark Brandon
The profile picture of Biden’s TikTok account shows the president’s face with red laser eyes, an image that is reused in his first TikTok referencing the meme Dark Brandon. Dark Brandon refers to a series of memes depicting a darker, edgier Joe Biden. The memes appropriate DarkMAGA imagery originally used by rightwing posters to depict Donald Trump as well as the Let's Go Brandon catchphrase. The trend started in early 2022 on Twitter and in its original usage, Dark Brandon was highly ironic, with the memes mostly joking about Biden's perceived senility and inability to act in the forceful, dramatic ways depicted in Dark Brandon memes (Know Your Memes).
Since the summer of 2022 members of Joe Biden's administration and several United States Senators shared Dark Brandon memes to cash in on the meme's continuing popularity with White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty sharing a Dark Brandon meme on Twitter.
We can observe the fight for dominance and the ruling narrative in an information warfare between the Republicans and the Democrats. Compare: How WH aides appropriated the meme of their boss as an underworld kin (Politico).
Dark Brandon – portraying the president as a two-steps-ahead Machiavelli — is driving the Biden campaign's merchandise sales, Axios reported in August 2023:
More than 54% of the store's total revenue is coming from Brandon-themed products, his re-election team told Axios with "Dark T-Shirt" and "Dark Roast Mug" as the best-selling products.
🕵️ Just like we drew it up
President Biden trolled MAGA Republicans on Sunday night, poking fun at conspiracy theories surrounding the NFL and pop sensation Taylor Swift after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl. “Just like we drew it up,” Biden wrote on X, formerly Twitter, alongside the “Dark Brandon” meme depicting the president with lasers shooting out of his eyes (The Hill).
Unfounded claims about Swift's alleged role as a government plant have been swirling for some time. Last month, Fox News host Jesse Watters speculated that Swift might be a Pentagon "psyop" — an asset used for psychological operations (NPR). Extending a weekslong right-wing meltdown over Taylor Swift’s political preferences, former President Donald J. Trump declared on Sunday that it would be “disloyal” for Ms. Swift to endorse President Biden for re-election (NYT).
Now what?
The Biden campaign wants to go viral (Politico) yet whether the campaign can make the 81-year-old president look cool on the platform and beyond if all that effort and a color-changing mug is enough to prevent Trump 2024 remains an open question (New York Times). There are currently four TikTok videos on the account. Let’s check back in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile here is a little reading list:
Cervi, L., Tejedor, S., & Blesa, F. G. (2023). TikTok and political communication: the latest frontier of politainment? A case study. Media and communication, 11(2), 203-217.
Galip, I. (2023). Propaganda, Digital Diplomacy, Meme Wars: How Digital Confrontation Is Shaping the New World Order, in: Ferrari, A., & Tafuro Ambrosetti, E. (2023). Multipolarity after Ukraine: old wine in new bottles?. Multipolarity after Ukraine, 1-127.
Mortensen, M., & Neumayer, C. (2021). The playful politics of memes. Information, Communication & Society, 24(16), 2367-2377.
Zeng, J., & Abidin, C. (2021). ‘# OkBoomer, time to meet the Zoomers’: Studying the memefication of intergenerational politics on TikTok. Information, Communication & Society, 24(16), 2459-2481.
Thanks for reading. Speak soon. Ciao, Marcus ☕
UPDATE
Feb, 15: TikTokers Have Some Advice For Joe Biden’s New Account (Politico)
Feb, 16: Why Biden had to join TikTok (FWIW)