As ceasefire announcements between the US and Iran—and separately between Israel and Lebanon—dominated headlines over the past two weeks, they also prompted a look back at how war spread online: through memes.
There were jokes about conscription. Captions about getting drafted, but at least with a Bluetooth device. The song “Bazooka” went viral, with users lip-syncing to “Rest in peace my granny, she got hit by a bazooka.” Military filters followed. So did posts about Americans wanting to be sent to Dubai “to save all the IG models.”
Across the Gulf, the tone was different but the instinct was the same. Memes joked that Iran was replying to Israel faster than some person you’re thinking about. Delivery drivers were shown “dodging missiles.” “Eid fits” became hazmat suits and tactical vests.
Dark humor is one of the oldest responses to fear, a way of reclaiming control, however briefly, over events that offer none. Variations of that idea appear across psychology and philosophy, including Freud’s relief theory, which frames humor as a release of tension.
But social media changes the scale and speed of that instinct.
A joke once shared within a small community can become a global template in minutes. Algorithms do not reward depth or accuracy; they reward engagement. The memes that travel fastest are usually stripped of context, easy to recognize and simple to remix.
Middle East scholar and media analyst Adel Iskandar traces political satire back centuries, from banned satirical papyri in ancient Egypt to cartoons during revolutions and gallows humor in modern wars. “Where there is hardship, there is satire,” he says. “Where there is loss of hope, there is hope in comedy.”
That tradition still exists online. But today it is fused with recommendation systems designed to keep attention moving.
Memes Spread Faster Than Facts
The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he described how ideas replicate like genes. On today’s internet, replication follows platform logic.
Fitness means generality. A meme does not need to be accurate. It needs to feel familiar. It needs the right format, paired with trending audio and the right emotional shorthand.
“A meme is like a virus,” Iskandar says. “If it doesn’t travel, it’ll die.”
The most visible response online is not always the truest one. It is often just the easiest to spread. And once context disappears, one crisis can start to resemble any other.
Geography shapes humor too and adds another level of tension. “If you live far away from the threat, you’re capable of producing content that ridicules it with an element of safety,” says Iskandar. “Whereas if you happen to be within close proximity, it is more of a fatalism.”
That divide matters. For some users, war exists mainly as mediated spectacle: clips, edits, graphics, headlines, and reaction posts. For others, it is sirens, uncertainty, disrupted flights, rising prices, and messages checking who is safe.
The same meme can function as entertainment in one country and emotional survival in another. Take the American experience of violence, which Sut Jhally, professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says “is very mediated.”
What much of the Western world has consumed instead is what cultural critic George Gerbner called “happy violence”: spectacular, consequence-free, and detached from the aftermath.
Jhally argues that the September 11 attacks remain the defining modern American experience of war-adjacent political violence. Much else has been cinematic: distant invasions, blockbuster destruction, video-game logic, apocalypse franchises.
The teenager from the Midwest joking about being drafted is drawing from zombie films and superhero apocalypses. “There is almost no discussion about what an actual Third World War would look like,” he says. “People do not have a perception of what that really looks like.”
It is easy, from a distance, to talk about dark humor as a coping mechanism, to paint it as charming, even admirable evidence of human resilience, even for those adjacent to it in the Gulf. It is something else entirely when the person making the joke is doing so from inside what Iskandar calls, without hyperbole, the end of the world.
Propaganda Learns Meme Lingo
Memes are not only made by users. States increasingly communicate in the same visual language: short clips, cinematic edits, gaming references, AI-generated scenes, triumphant captions, soundtrack-first storytelling.
They are also speaking to audiences already conditioned by decades of mediated conflict. For many users, war is familiar less as lived experience than as theater: fast edits, heroes, villains, clean victories, and consequence-free destruction.
That makes meme-native propaganda easier to absorb, because it already resembles the entertainment language people know.
Memes tend to carry the literacy and political assumptions of the community that made them. But so does state-produced content. In the early days of Operation Epic Fury, the White House posted videos splicing real combat footage from strikes on Iran with clips from Hollywood films and video games, all set to pounding soundtracks and overlaid with “Justice the American Way.”
Iran, for its part, shared a series of AI-generated Lego-style animations depicting Iranian military victory against the US and Israel. The White House claimed its videos generated more than 2 billion impressions; some analysts argued Iran's Lego videos outpaced even that.
Both figures, as reported by Time magazine, dwarfed the reach of any individual news report about the actual events. “Every nation-state embroiled in conflict is actively trying to promote its resilience and normalcy as a state project, not an individual experience,” Iskandar says.
These are not memes in the traditional sense. But they operate in the same ecosystem of highly shareable content built for reaction, circulation, and identity reinforcement.
And once users remix that material ironically, propaganda can spread further under the cover of humor. “Humor is one of the most powerful forms of propaganda,” Jhally says. “If you can make someone laugh, then you can do almost anything.”
The Illusion of Understanding
The bigger risk may not be ignorance. It may be false fluency. Iskandar holds this simultaneously with a more generous reading.
“The best use of a meme,” he says, “is for you to look at it, have a contemplative engagement with it, and it'll help trigger some sort of curiosity and further exploration.” Similar to standing in front of a painting of the French Revolution, you don't walk away with a complete understanding of the conflict, but you might take a step toward one.
A 2024 German study in Frontiers in Psychology found that social media news consumption can increase people’s sense of being informed without increasing actual knowledge. Researchers called it the “illusion of knowledge.”
The 2023 Arab Youth Survey of 3,600 young Arabs carried out by PR and communications agency ASDA’A BCW found that 61 percent still get their news from social media, even as television remains the most trusted source at 89 percent. At that scale, the risk is not a lack of information but fragmented information masquerading as the full picture.
Extending that to memes, people are not ignorant of crises or war. They are familiar with it, which may be worse. Ignorance sends you looking for answers while familiarity suggests you may already have them. “Most people do not interact with memes through a lens of sophistication,” Iskandar says. “The vast majority circulate the content with far less engagement.”
Jhally, whose work has long examined how media frames the Arab world for Western audiences, draws a sharper distinction. “There’s a big difference between knowing something and understanding it,” he says. “Understanding requires history, a much broader timeframe.”
But the economics of attention reward fragments, not depth. Users receive crises as clips, jokes, symbols, and updates detached from the systems that produced them.
“The world becomes fragmented,” Jhally says. “A fragmented system that doesn’t allow for more concentrated understandings of the situation.” The result is a public that may recognize the meme, repeat the headline, and still miss the conflict itself. This is the media literacy crisis in practice: an excess of exposure mistaken for understanding.
“I wish this would just be a nudge for people to go and understand things in a historical context, but we know that’s not what the algorithms do,” Jhally says. “The moment you look at one meme, you’ll be suggested another one. Once you’re there, they’ve got you.”
The feed moves at the speed of humor. War does not. And when every crisis arrives as content, the real danger is not that people laugh but that they no longer know what they are looking at.
This story was originally published by WIRED Middle East.
