Why political messaging increasingly resembles meme culture

Several days after the United States first launched strikes on Iran, the White House published a video on its official social media accounts that quickly went viral.

The video opened with clips of the protagonist from the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas before cutting to real footage of US strikes on Iranian targets.

As explosions filled the screen, the familiar "WASTED" graphic from the game appeared over the footage.

Within hours, versions of the video were being reposted, edited and circulated across X, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts by supporters, critics, meme pages and commentary accounts alike.

The original post on X garnered nearly 18 million views. But once the clip was chopped into shorter edits, repackaged by creators and reuploaded elsewhere, it continued to rack up views.

Much of that spread took place through a familiar format on platforms such as TikTok: short reaction edits, in which users speak directly to camera while the original video plays beside or behind them.

In some clips, creators paused the footage to comment, mock or fact‑check what they were seeing.

The result was the same underlying footage re‑appearing again and again in users' feeds, not as a White House post, but as raw material for other creators to share with their own followers.

Carl Miller, co-founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, said the phenomenon reflects much broader transformation in how people now encounter and share political messaging online.

"We can see on the surface it looks like all of this is very unserious and trivialising. But what is happening under here is a whole new way of thinking about how information should be crafted and spread," he said.

"Whether it’s memes, virals or AI-generated videos, they are all trying to capture attention."

That dynamic of content spreading because it provokes reaction, both positive and negative, is also familiar to people who work inside the mechanics of social platforms.

Stevie Haughey, who runs some of Ireland’s most widely followed meme and culture pages, said sharing is often driven less by belief than by response.

"You don’t have to agree with it to share it," Mr Haughey said.

"Polarising content actually does the best because you get people who feel very strongly about it, but then the people on the complete flip side, they share it and they're saying, 'I don't agree with this'."

In previous eras, wartime messaging was largely delivered through speeches, posters and television broadcasts. But online now, political content no longer competes just with other news.

It competes with memes, celebrity gossip, sports highlights and comedy videos - all inside the same endless feed, where it’s now forced to fight for attention like every other form of online content.

"They're looking for shares and retweets. They're looking to go viral," said Dr Stephen Treacy, a lecturer in Information Systems at University College Cork (UCC).

"It's engagement, engagement, engagement. If they put out something as ludicrous, as insane as they can, and people are talking about it, regardless of seeing them as positive or negative, that's their position," Dr Treacy added.

In a recent statement to NBC News, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared to openly frame the videos in similar terms while responding to criticism of the posts.

"This is another example of our non-traditional and traditional media strategy, which has proven highly successful," Ms Leavitt said.

She said White House videos linked to the conflict had generated "more than 2 billion impressions" online.

"People are talking about the tremendous success of the war," the statement added, "and that’s exactly the point."

"Attention is a new kind of territory," Mr Miller said.

"You can win it and lose it, and getting people to share and respond to your content is probably the most important thing in that battle for attention."

He said meme-style content is particularly effective because it allows users to reshape and redistribute ideas themselves.

"A meme is a cultural piece of DNA. People can take it, change it and adapt it for their own audiences while still retaining the core idea. And that's what makes it so powerful and shareable," he added.

Similar dynamics have also been visible from pro-Iranian networks and accounts linked to the conflict which have flooded social media with AI-generated memes, parody videos and clips designed for circulation on platforms such as TikTok, X and Instagram.

Analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), an organisation that monitors online influence campaigns, shows that posts by Iranian diplomatic and official accounts collectively attracted hundreds of millions of views in the first 50 days of the conflict.

When researchers compared activity in the 50 days before and after the war began, they found posting volume had nearly quadrupled - rising from roughly 10,500 posts to more than 40,000.

Engagement increased even more sharply, with likes jumping from around 660,000 to approximately 22 million, alongside dramatic rises in shares, comments and views.

The surge was driven disproportionately by content designed to provoke reaction and participation, rather than formal statements or traditional updates.

"If you can shock people, that is one of the strongest ways that videos can go viral," Mr Haughey, who runs the Meanwhile in Ireland and Ireland Before You Die pages said.

While most of the content on his pages is built around humour, he has gained millions of followers across various platforms, and through the process gained an understanding of how various algorithms work in practice.

"Emotion is probably the number one ingredient for viral videos. If people don't feel anything and the video is boring, it's not going to go viral.

"People only have so much time in the day, and if they're sent a short video, it can give them an emotion that can make them happy, make them laugh, or the opposite," he added.

And those same attention-driven dynamics are now shaping how political messaging linked to the conflict circulates on all sides, according to Dr Stephen Treacy.

"You’re seeing an awful lot of content being generated around the Iranian war by creators who view it through the lens of satire," he said.

"They’re producing highly shareable, very catchy clips that condense something quite complicated into a couple of minutes.

"As a result, we're seeing a fundamental change in how propaganda is created, shared and interpreted."

A report by Jack McCarron and Genevieve Brennan on how political messaging spreads online is broadcast on the 19 May edition of Prime Time on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player.