The power of #MemeToo

“Toxic ex here.” That was how Ukraine’s official Twitter account responded in 2020 when Russia’s Twitter account posted a series of Soviet-era scenes and the message: “Many #Ukrainians still remember the good ol’ days when #Soviet Ukraine was the USSR’s breadbasket.” It was the grammar of an online spat applied to international relations and that approach has continued even after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

On 24 February 2022, the day the attacks began, Ukraine’s official Twitter account posted a caricature of Adolf Hitler stroking Vladimir Putin’s face like a proud father admiring his son. It was the kind of political cartoon that could have been used in any war since the adoption of the printing press, but on social media it took on a different quality. In a follow-up tweet, posted two hours later, Ukraine wrote: “This is not a ‘meme’, but our and your reality right now.” Despite that powerful rhetoric, it was still a meme.

Russia’s Twitter account is pretending the war isn’t happening, pumping out a steady stream of posts about historical events, famous figures and sports people. But Ukraine has continued to mix messages in a tone you might expect from a nation under attack, with some that use the sarcastic and cynical argot of online arguments. When Kyiv’s Twitter account posted a meme about downed Russian planes, Ukraine retweeted it, adding just the online slang “based” (meaning being yourself without fear of what other people think).

Every war since the emergence of social media has been called “the first social media war”. The conflict in Ukraine is far from the first. It’s not even the first war to have been captured on the short video app, TikTok. Despite a New Yorker piece making this claim in its headline, videos from the civil wars in Syria and Libya, as well as the Nagorno-Karabakh War and the 2021 Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, were frequently shared on TikTok. The difference with the war in Ukraine is that more people in the US and UK are now watching.

Similarly, Ukraine is far from the first country to use memes in its information war arsenal. Russia has trolled its enemies – both nations and individuals – online for years. But just as the easy win it was predicted to achieve on the battlefield did not materialise, the notion that Russia would dominate the online fight has proved to be mistaken.

While memes have presented Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a Marvel superhero and object of lust, Vladimir Putin – a much more familiar figure to most people before the conflict – has been easy to present as a ridiculous character: a small man sat at the end of a vast table or hiding in his bunker. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of these caricatures to form a permanent impression.

Our concept of Napoleon, for instance, is arguably the result of political cartoons – memes spread through newspapers – that presented him as a small man taking his insecurities out on the world. While there were plenty of cartoons ridiculing Bonaparte before it – one from 1798 features him with his trousers pulled down farting balloons and guillotines towards England – it wasn’t until 1803 that the “tiny Napoleon” meme took root.

The content of modern memes mocking the enemy isn’t all that different from the cartoons that came before them

That year, James Gillray drew “Maniac ravings or Little Boney in a strong fit” which features an exaggeratedly undersized emperor flipping over furniture and raving about “the British Parliament” and “London newspapers! Oh! Oh! Oh!”. Bonaparte was actually 5’ 7”, but after Gillray’s depiction of him the idea of the tiny tyrant became popular with other cartoonists, who drew him waddling along in oversized boots, overshadowed by his own hat, and struggling to remove his sword from a scabbard that scraped along the ground as he walked.

The content of modern memes mocking the enemy isn’t all that different from the cartoons that came before them. How wars are communicated to us, by states and observers alike, is driven by the grammar of the dominant media at the time. World War II was played out in newsreels and radio broadcasts. In the 1960s, Vietnam was a televised war with a transmission delay, while the first Iraq War in 1990-91 brought 24-hour coverage.

The way modern wars are presented is splintered by social media. The war in Ukraine as seen on TikTok is different to the one presented on Twitter and Instagram. The structure and cultures of those sites act as prisms through which messages are filtered and distorted. The ephemerality of social media means that while the stories shared through it may shape the way people think of the war in the future, the memes that influenced them may be long gone.

Over 200 years on from the creation of the “tiny Napoleon” meme, it still resonates. Will the jokes and taunts of today prove as sticky for Vladimir Putin’s legacy? It’s hard to predict but the point of meme warfare is to be effective in the moment. Ukraine is speaking the language of social media because it has to be heard now.

Mic Wright is a freelance writer and journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics