Megan Brown
Staff Writer
During Joan Donovan’s time at Chautauqua this week, she has listened to the lectures preceding hers — Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters of the United States, who opened the week on Monday, and Javier Corrales, who spoke Tuesday on authoritarian trends using Venezuela as a case study.
“We are in a moment of democratic backsliding. That means headline by headline, right by right, as Celina said, we are losing the things that, frankly, we have fought for — in particular the generation of folks that are here today,” Donovan said. “I can’t imagine how maddening it is to see the rights that were enshrined in the ’60s and ’70s start to disappear for your children and grandchildren.”
Donovan gave her lecture “Meme Wars” at 10:45 a.m. Wednesday in the Amphitheater as part of Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Six theme “The Global Rise of Authoritarianism.” From cat memes to the Epstein files, she covered the entwinement of internet culture and politics in the United States.
An assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, Donovan founded The Critical Internet Studies Institute, which researches and provides educational information on media manipulation and emerging technologies. In 2022, she co-authored the book Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.
Ever the professor, Donovan defined key terms and ideas in her lecture, starting with media, which she defines as “an artifact of communication.”
“The internet is nothing more than transactions between media,” she said. “You post online — that creates a piece of media. You share a picture, a video — all of these things are media. You download a book — that’s media. When we study media manipulation, we’re looking at how media is changed by artful or unfair means so as to serve one’s purpose.”
Donovan has what she calls the ABCDs of what she looks for when she researches media manipulation: actors, behavior, content, design. Alongside this acronym, she showed a picture of a person holding up a landline phone to a record player playing the Beatles. While her students may be unfamiliar with what’s going on in the picture, she said it represents the aspects of digital infrastructure.
“You have the record player, which is the platform, whether it be Facebook or Twitter. You have the content, which is the actual vinyl record, the 45, that is what people might be sharing. You have an amplification system. It moves beyond you. And then the thing that you don’t really understand is the motive of the act,” she said. “The technological design is important, because social media is nothing more than an advertising system that you are allowed to use as
a consumer.”
From the websites people visit to their medical ailments, tech companies possess data that then allows them to put targeted ads in front of users.
“I get a lot of ads for pet hair vacuums, and I’m like, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ ” she said. “I know I am a lesbian, but maybe the stereotypes are true.”
Pets have played a crucial part in the online meme wars. In 2021, while being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, who was a Fox News host at the time, then-Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and childless cat ladies “who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Democrats latched onto the idea of “childless cat ladies,” creating merchandise and posts crafted around that moniker. Donovan, mother herself to cats Milo and Dottie, couldn’t help but exclaim, “Holy misogyny.”
“I am child-free, not childless,” Donovan said.
The message behind Vance’s statement undergirds the trope that women who are unable to be told what to do are shifty and devious. But this message is not new; in fact, it stems all the way back to the Salem witch trials.
“We’re drawn back to, even further in the history, how women were demonized as witches, and witches often had a familiar, a black cat,” she said. “They could change into the black cat, and then infiltrate meetings. They wouldn’t be noticed. They would be on the ground. Men would be doing serious men stuff, and then the familiar — the cat — would be down in the corner, waiting to go back and tell the witch.”
During the suffragette movement, anti-suffragists would send mail with images of sad, enraged or beaten-up cats to discourage people from participating in the movement. Suffragists clapped back with proud and confident cats advocating for women’s right to vote.
“What’s interesting about this moment is that women have always been painted in this light as somehow devious, as somehow hiding their true intention, as not being a faithful partner in democracy by wanting to have voting rights,” she said. “And I don’t know how we got back here.”
Vance’s childless cat lady comment was not the last thing he had to say about pets. On Sept. 10, 2024, the day then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would debate sitting Vice President Kamala Harris, Vance tweeted out that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. At the end of his tweet, he said to keep the cat memes coming.
Donovan played the clip from the debate of Trump announcing, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
AI-generated memes exploded of Trump sitting on a private plane with animals around him and a fluffy white cat in his lap, among others of him saving or protecting kittens and other animals. Although some of the memes do not have an immediate political message on them, they draw people into the discourse.
“You start to hear about, well, they’re eating with pets, and you’re aggravated, right? Because pets are part of your family, pets are helpless. A lot of people identify with their pets in a very caring and loving way,” Donovan said. “What worse thing to charge someone of than harming animals, defenseless, little baby kitties?”
However, the insidious nature of the meme did not stop online. People made bomb threats to public spaces in Springfield and troopers came in to patrol the schools. Haitian immigrants in Springfield are not the only victims of hate from online attacks.
“These kinds of bomb threats happen nearly every single time that a high-profile political figure calls out a person or a town or a group, and it’s almost like catnip, pun intended, to their audience,” Donovan said. “The audience knows what to do, whether it’s harassing someone or figuring out their personal information or calling their offices and trying to get them fired.”
Turning to current events, Donovan needed to address Jeffrey Epstein. To understand the lore and fervor behind the current news surrounding Epstein, Donovan showed a pyramid broken down into three parts. At the top are those who believe in the conspiracy theory Pizzagate, which is that Democrats are Satan worshippers who held abducted children captive in a Washington D.C. pizza joint. Pizzagate conspiracy theorists believe former President Bill Clinton was in collusion with Epstein, and they’re looking for objective truth about
the matter. In the middle are Qanon conspiracy theorists, those who are die-hard MAGA fans. At the bottom are those who want to annihilate the deep state, such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who currently head the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Whether it’s ‘They’re eating the cats and dogs,’ or ‘There was no client list,’ all of that is out there and up for debate,” Donovan said. “But what we lack are facts.”
The best thing to do in this case, Donovan said, is believe women — especially since there are potentially over 1,000 women and girls who Epstein preyed upon.
However, with tech oligarchs gaining political control through the content they allow on their sites, Donovan said it’s becoming harder to do her research.
“They’re affecting our university research,” she said. “They’re affecting who gets to study what because they’re deciding who gets data, who doesn’t get data. Unfortunately, we’re in this predicament where we do need to be in these networks and understanding, as researchers at least, how they work.”
In this situation, truth needs an advocate, Donovan said. With academic articles and investigative journalism hidden behind paywalls, finding truth becomes difficult and can lead people to social media to get their news. To combat this, everyone needs to have the mindset of being a “journal-ish.” They must use their platforms to find and spread “timely, accurate knowledge” and be a “good steward of information online.”
“There’s no greater power than information because it’s how we make decisions,” Donovan said. “When we have stark information inequalities, and we have populations of people that are not able to have access to the truth, we run the risk of making decisions politically that are harmful to this idea of democracy.”
