The Far-Right Is Weaponizing Instagram to Recruit Gen Z

Memes are the internet’s new political battleground

Credit: Gaelle Marcel/Unsplash

Maia is a 14-year-old high school freshman from Oregon. Since January 2019, she’s been organizing strikes at her school to raise awareness about the climate crisis. She’s part of a global movement of youth motivated to demand action, many of them inspired by Swedish campaigner and school strikes founder Greta Thunberg, who posts on Instagram.

“By posting about it and sharing Greta’s posts, I’ve met other strikers all over America and even in Germany,” Maia explains. “It’s been a really cool way of networking.” She says around half her friends feel they know what’s going on in the world. “And most of them are educated through Instagram, which I guess is both good and bad.”

Maia’s social media habit is typical of most people her age. A recent survey by Business Insider found that 59% of 13- to 21-year-olds polled listed Instagram as their main news source. Politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are turning their attention to the platform as they try to appeal to Generation Z’s first-time voters in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

And while Instagram has enabled teens such as Maia, or the Parkland students’ campaign for stricter gun laws, to mobilize and organize protests with ease, it also carries some obvious downsides. In March, the Atlantic reported that the platform is becoming “the internet’s new home for hate,” teeming with accounts that promote extremism and misinformation.

“If it’s a news story, I go to a reliable source, like New York Times or Washington Post. If it’s a meme, well, it’s just opinion so you don’t really need to fact check it.”

“I’ve had Instagram since I was eight so [the algorithm] knows I’m not into racist comments,” says Maia. “But when I go through my friends’ accounts who are more conservative than me, I do see a lot.” After she began the school strike protests, she was added to group chats that shared multiple conspiracy memes dismissing the climate crisis. “People send things to me [from Instagram] saying, ‘Look, an adult is saying this, so it must be true and you’re wrong,’” she says.

Researchers studying the far-right maintain that many groups are deliberately using the platform to appeal to teenagers through the use of memes and viral content. London-based anti-extremism think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has found that some far-right groups organize through military-style teams, with entire groups dedicated to creating and disseminating meme content.

As a visual platform, Instagram doesn’t lend itself to in-depth, nuanced information, and as such, political Instagram accounts often trade in highly polarizing images that contain witty or relatable text. “Meme accounts are the key way users get their news,” says Tim Armoo, CEO of the London-based marketing agency Fanbytes. “They might be like, ‘Why go to the BBC when I can have my own customized feed?’”

In a statement, Instagram said: “There is no place for racism or harmful content on Instagram and we continue to invest heavily in developing tools and technologies to identify and remove this type of content. We recently launched a way for people to report content they believe to be false, directly from within the app. We also work closely with Facebook to understand false content they see, and apply what we learn to Instagram.”

Armoo maintains that the majority of political memes are not created with any sinister intention and are simply the work of young people who care about political issues. However, he admits they are easily and regularly hijacked, giving the recent example of Sudan crisis scam accounts. “We’re definitely seeing a lot of far-right influencers creating content and then 13- or 14-year-olds reposting it because they believe it to be true,” he says.

Grant is 15, lives in the South, and describes himself as “right-leaning but not radical.” He runs a conservative meme account called @_gen_z__ on Instagram that is aimed at fellow teens. “We just wanted to get the word out, and Instagram is really good for reaching new people through the explore page,” he says. Grant and his friends mainly repost other users’ memes rather than create their own. “If it’s a news story, I go to a reliable source, like the New York Times or Washington Post. If it’s a meme, well, it’s just opinion so you don’t really need to fact check it.”

“Instagram is struggling to monitor things. Conspiracy theorists who have been chucked off Twitter have moved over to Instagram because it’s much freer.”

He says he has noticed a rise in extremism and misinformation among the community, and one of his recent posts warned followers to be careful about a recent spike in fake stories. “A lot of conservative pages try and tear down the other side, and we’re not really into that,” he says. “You can reaffirm your position; you can say, ‘There’s a crisis at the border, and we should do something about it.’ But if you say, ‘These immigrants are horrible people; they are rapists and murderers’ … I don’t really agree with that.”

Michael Wendling is an editor at BBC News and author of Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House. “Instagram is currently in the same position Facebook was two or three years ago, where they are struggling to monitor things. Conspiracy theorists who have been chucked off Twitter have moved over to Instagram because it’s much freer.”

Memes and the far-right have a long history. According to Wendling, many of them originate on 4chan and 8chan — boisterous, anything-goes discussion forums notorious for harboring far-right communities. 8chan was shut down after the El Paso shooter posted his manifesto to the site. “When anyone starts a thread, they need to post an image, and the image is a key part of what’s being communicated,” he says. “The best ones are not just on the chats; they end up on mainstream sites.”

Wendling says that many memes are simply meant to appeal to the community and may seem baffling to those not familiar with figures such as “alt-right” icon Pepe the frog. But others, such as the notorious anti-Semitic Hillary Clinton meme that originated on 8chan and was tweeted by Trump during the last presidential campaign, are easy to decipher. “That one was very overt in what it was signifying,” he says.

Research by Savvas Zannettou, a PhD student at Cyprus University of Technology specializing in memes and information warfare, concluded that 6.33% of political memes on Twitter originate on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board — a huge number for a board with just a few million users. “They are targeting specific populations, such as young people, to change their political ideology and influence them towards specific movements,” he says.

Zannettou points to a recent trend for memes showing Pepe dressed as a clown, which were purposefully spread on mainstream platforms using false accounts. Many memes also borrow from gaming culture, such as the term NPC, or non-playable character, used to refer to people they view as void of independent thinking.

Jacob Davey from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who has infiltrated far-right chat groups, found the way far-right groups organize themselves into teams dedicated to, for example, trolling liberals or creating memes, is particularly appealing to teens. “They have almost gamified the process,” he told the BBC. Turning the dissemination of hate speech into a fun community game helps attract those who may not be interested in traditional activism.

Maia tells OneZero she believes her generation could benefit from better education around social media use. “Right now [at school] we’re getting taught what books to read … but most [young people] only have Instagram and don’t ever open a book. You should be telling them what informational pages to follow and what not to because there’s no guidance for that.”

Armoo believes platforms have a responsibility toward “young, impressionable” audiences and believes Instagram should follow Facebook and Twitter’s lead in deleting extremist accounts. The platform recently deleted a number of meme accounts, but many politically extremist ones remain. The issue is only likely to get more contentious in the run-up to the 2020 elections.

“The worst thing [politicians] can do is create a profile and just put their own voice in,” he says. “An example of using it well is Bernie Sanders teaming up with Cardi B — she has the audience and she knows how to talk to that audience. You need to immerse yourself in the pop culture of the actual platform.”

Whatever politicians decide to do, expect to see Instagram playing a bigger role in next year’s elections than ever before.