The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Nadezhda Ozornina, whose focus is on the use of humorous Internet memes in fighting the climate crisis. Climate change has a comparatively low news value overall, outside of concrete crises, and humour has the potential to break through where news reporting itself does not; how are memes deployed in climate discourse, then?
There is no unified definition of Internet memes, but broadly they contain text, image, and/or video content that reproduce pop-cultural references and require contextual knowledge for a full understanding. Humour has always been present in political communication, but does not always help with increasing engagement with political issues; such humour might variously be self-enhancing, affiliative towards others, self-defeating, or aggressive towards others.
The focus of the present study was on Reddit’s r/ClimateMemes subreddit; it drew a random selection of such memes and conducted a manual analysis of some 787 memes. These were coded at the post level, for a range of aspects including climate change causes, consequences, and measures; humour styles and types; and attribution of responsibility.
More memes focussed on consequences than causes and actions; energy production as a cause, extreme heat as a consequence, and conversion to renewables as an action. Aggressive humour was prevalent, often centring on before/after comparisons, personalisation, and other strategies. Macro-level attributions of responsibility (humans overall, politics) and meso-level attributions (older generations, the rich) were especially prominent.
It would now be interesting to see whether, how, and how far these memes circulate beyond the climate memes subreddit – for instance during the COP climate conferences or during national elections. How political actors themselves utilise such memes in their communications should also be examined.
