There is a problem in or with the correlation to memes and politics with impressionable voters (ages 17-22) despite the agreements in the terms and agreements of social media sites to protect voters from seeing biasing images, as philosophised by Max Haiven (2013). This problem has negatively impacted these voters because it subconsciously promotes political ideals before the individuals can come to their own conclusion about political stances. A possible cause of this problem would be the content the impressional voters see on social media, as it is not moderated efficiently. Perhaps a study that investigates the correlation between the memes seen and political beliefs by conducting a survey could remedy this situation

This study is significant because it can provide individuals with the knowledge of how influential memes can be towards a personal belief, such as politics. This is also important so social media companies can re-discuss how they want to moderate content that can potentially negatively impact individual decision.

A survey to assess the relationship between the two topics. In the age range of 17-23 year olds who live in the state of Washington.

My hypothesis is that the political memes will be positively correlated to political stances as long as the viewer understands the joke the meme is making.

My assumptions are that people are typically going to follow at least a couple accounts that post political memes due to the fact that individuals are starting to be more politically active at a younger age.

Meme: “Joke that usually has a corresponding picture or video that can be used with different text to make a specific sub-culture joke.” 

Perception: “How an individual comprehends and views certain subject matters”

I will be using the terms political stance or belief as “How the individual identifies with political issues and/or a political party”

I will be using the term “impressionable voter” as another way to reference the cohort I am studying.

Due to COVID-19, there are some limitations being put on the survey. It made in-person advertising impossible, as well as paying for the upgrade to the survey engine, so all the features that were needed for the survey could not be accessed.

The findings are inconclusive with broad over-arching themes that show that there might be a correlation between the two, but it is unable to properly be assessed due to unforeseeable complications with the survey engine. 

As stated before, there are not any statistically significant findings due to an survey engine error. However, during this process there was a lot of important information about how to create and go through the survey process

The next steps that could be taken is to repeat this same survey question with a couple of partners to get more growth, as well as, getting a better engine in order to get usable results to see if the broad trends that were found in this survey actually could be statistically significant in order to add to the knowlege base.

Gabriella Hursh

Class of 2020