An expert in political satire says memes can be an incredibly powerful tool to add to debate, but internet users need to be savvy about where they come from and what kind of message they're pushing.
Memes are jokes shared online using text on top of pictures. They're in the news after David Wong-Tung, who is National Party leader Judith Collins' husband, shared a variety that have been labelled distasteful.
The memes included some calling the Prime Minister 'the Incredible Sulk', or appropriating the language of the government's COVID-19 response calling on people to 'Unite Against CINDY-20'.
Wong-Tung also faced some nasty memes himself, with one depicting him as a chimpanzee.
Writer and former Labour staffer Sarah Austen-Smith, who holds a master's degree in political satire, told Morning Report memes aren't all bad.
"Generally, memes can level the playing field between creators, the public and the powerful," she said.
"They can actually engage people in debate, and we've seen a wonderful comeback of political satire with meme culture."
The problems come when memes begin to appeal to nasty instincts of racism, sexism, and misinformation.
"Bad memes, I think, run a risk of eroding confidence in democracy. We've seen that overseas. They can be used to have the public lose faith in democratic institutions."
Meme pages have sprung up on Facebook in support of all of New Zealand's main political parties. Most make it clear in the description the page is not officially affiliated with the party it posts memes on behalf of.
The most popular is the Labour Party-based 'Backing the Kiwi Meme', which has just under 54,500 likes, followed by the National Party-favouring 'National Party's Meme Working Group', which has just over 22,000 likes.
A non-party-aligned page titled 'NZ swing voters against dogmatic party affiliated memes' has nearly 18,000 likes.
Austen-Smith said she had checked in NZ's meme pages and noted a change in them as the election neared.
"Last year that content was quite soft, it was humour and LOLs. Now we're seeing more article shares, hard content. That's a deliberate engagement strategy by those pages to get people following with easy content and as soon as you build that following, you can start pushing out deliberate messaging.
"So, I suppose for me the takeaway is this is all very deliberate, and people just need to be conscious of that."
She doesn't think legislation is much of an answer though.
"I don't think regulation is necessarily the way forward. I just think people need to be a bit more savvy about what we're seeing online and then understanding that it will not be by accident."
RNZ
