I like how your paper included different memes of varying seriousness. For example, the grumpy cat meme is fun and lighthearted, however COVID memes can be dangerous and can be used to spread misinformation. The easiness to create and share memes about COVID 19 has become extremely dangerous by making easier to spread misinformation. One of my favorite memes revolving COVID-19 has to do with Rudy Gobert. Rudy Gobert is a professional NBA player. When COVID first started, Rudy jokingly coughed and rubbed his hands all over a microphone at a press conference. It was later discovered that he tested positive for COVID and the entire NBA was shut down.
I also like how you differentiate disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is false information that is used to persuade/influence public opinion. Misinformation is just the spread of false information the difference is the intent behind spreading false information. With all of this disinformation, is there a proposed way that we can combat it?
I found your topic to be very important, as memes spread false information constantly, and affect society. It is a relevant issue as it is pretty unavoidable, from young people looking on Instagram to older people on Facebook, the sharing of these memes is spread very easily and quickly. People are able to spread the information without doing more research, because they believe what is shown through the internet. It would have been interesting to see more information on how it is spread, whether people are more likely to reshare memes based on who posts or on the number of likes memes get. That would have helped give more clarity in correlation to the explanation of how the algorithms spread the disinformation.
I found the format and organization to be simple to follow, especially with the help of the pictures and hyperlinks. The hyperlinks were not too overwhelming, as we discussed in class prior, too many can take away from the piece itself. The memes helped give examples, to back up your statement, although more descriptions on the images themselves would have been more helpful for a reader to understand the point of them. The organization was done perfectly, because every time I found myself thinking of a question, it was answered within the following paragraph. Overall, it was a very relevant topic with good supporting details, both written and pictures.
I loved this! Very easy to read, you are an amazing writer! We both had similar projects so it’s nice to see a fellow meme lover, haha. What stuck me about this project was the organizational structure of the project. It made sure that an uniformed reader is introduced to and taught new terms as they arrive. Covid was ripe with misinformation, and I’m sure everyone here has had experience with family members holding on to bits of misinformation throughout the last year and half. I loved the way you drew an expressly straight line between how even inconspicuous memes can carry seeds of misinformation. It’s mind boggling that statistic where almost 2/3rds of anti vaccine misinformation online comes from only 12 people. Throughout the course of my research, I often had to come to terms with how powerful social media is in persuading people’s beliefs and what ends up sticking around in their head. It’s shocking to realize that so much power over belief is held by little more than a mere dozen of people who know how to leverage social media better than anyone else.
Before reading this project, I’ve never heard of disinformation. I didn’t know that there was a different term for spreading false information deliberately or accidentally. I like how the examples of certain types of memes were given after a short description about them in the “What is the role of memes?” section. Starting off with a meme in the introduction gives the paper a nice start as well. Also, the term “infodemic” is new to me, but I guess I knew what it was. I did notice that when everyone had to stay at home during the pandemic, people were sharing and reposting information much more often than before the pandemic. This occurred on places other than social media, like Whatsaap. For example, in my family group chats, people would send forwarded images and videos with information about covid-19 and other stuff. These images and videos would be forwarded from group to group so much that the message would say “forwarded many times”. I found this topic very relevant and the format allows the information to flow well.
I found your project engaging and informative, highlighting the darker side of memes and the sources of misinformation.
The covid meme examples you included were striking and effective. The “if masks work…” meme, especially showcases the danger that can come memes and the importance of being able to critically assess the credibility and logic behind memes.
I also was shocked to read about the “The Disinformation Dozen” being the main source of anti-vaccine propaganda. It demonstrates how negligent social media platforms have been in dealing with the problem. It would be easy for social media companies to enforce their policies against these individuals, as they so often do with issues of copyright infringement and community standard violations.
After reading some other projects, I was hoping someone would explore the influence of memes on spreading false information and I’m so glad you did! The text was broken up into digestible pieces, and the memes helped keep the audience engaged. I think it might be more effective if you increase the size of the images though since the text within them is so small and a little difficult to read. Otherwise, your project was very entertaining! Your tone right from the beginning of the text provoked excitement and suspense. Furthermore, you effectively balanced this more colloquial tone with a more serious one, which helped give the reader a moment to internalize the information they had just read.
Focusing the spread of false information on the pandemic successfully narrowed the direction of your topic enough to be specific without ruining its generalizability to other moments in time. Providing examples of disinformation by the Soviet Union helped with this. I think it would be interesting to include images of historical propaganda and compare them to political memes today. Overall, I think that the presentation of your topic was direct and concise. Great work!
I thought your topic was very prevalent in today’s society with a shift to the internet bigger than ever since the pandemic. It’s scary how memes can be made so easily and can contain a lot of misleading information. While most are meant to be taken as a joke, I feel like some may take it as the information to be partially true based on their own beliefs. Your addition of examples of the memes made me notice how some of them can actually look like an infographic which could actually motivate someone to continue spreading misinformation.
Furthermore, it was interesting to read about the differences between disinformation and misinformation. If I didn’t read your paper, I would’ve thought they would be synonyms. However, as I slowly understood the definitions of these terms, I was wondering if maybe the fact that misinformative memes (especially when it comes to COVID) could be a form of disinformation. While some may see them as comical and play them off as a joke, the creators of these memes may be using them as a source of quick information spreading.
Overall, I found your project to be interesting and easy to read. Much of the information you provided was straight to the point with the help of illustrations to guide us through your argument.
My favorite part about your project was how you built up your examples of memes in order of harmfulness to society. Many of us think of memes in a lighthearted way. This is how I looked at memes throughout most of my life. I’ve treated memes as jokes for the most part. What you did in this project is present a series of memes that slowly revealed just how dangerous memes can be for the spread of mis and disinformation. This was such an effective way of driving your point home. Even better is the fact that you further backed your claims with scientific evidence. The “Information Dozen” study was fascinating to learn about. It is disturbing to think that just twelve organization can do so much damage. Unfortunately, in my family, I have had to deal with many instances of mis and disinformation since the start of the pandemic. It has been fascinating yet unsettling to see how conspiracy theories have gradually eaten up a few of my family members, particularly one of my uncles. Before the pandemic, my uncle was pretty invested in the world of conspiracy theories. Yet I wouldn’t say that any of his wacky beliefs affected his life in a direct way. For example, my uncle has long held the belief that the government is spraying harmful chemicals out of airplanes in order to combat climate change (i.e. ‘chemtrails’). While this conspiracy might have caused my uncle some stress, I wouldn’t say it really affected his own life too much. More so, I would say it just made him skeptical of anything the government said or did. Flash forward to the outbreak of COVID-19, and my uncle’s wacky beliefs are directly affecting him as well as others. Not only is he putting himself in danger because of his disbelief in the COVID-19 vaccine, but he is also putting my older relatives at risk every time he sees them.
Your web-text does an amazing job of demonstrating this point in a scientific way. You lay out examples, cite relevant sources, and back your claims with strong argumentation. This was an excellent project!
The first paragraph hit too close to home. The pandemic was a time for people to spend more time online. This allowed things to go viral virtually every day. I also love that you already are talking about memes. With the pandemic, I realized the potential though, of our time being sprint online exponentially spreading misinformation. It’s crazy how our behavior became so radicalized now that we are back offline. I feel as though material and posts that are more extreme or radical tend to be shared more and spread more as well.
I love your section on memes. This was basically my project, talking about how memes are so much more than what they appear to be. They truly are a reflection of what is going on in our society. I can totally see how memes accessibility and readability added fuel to the infodemic fire. This gave clear opportunities for the spread of misinformation. However, this was basically always the case. Memes always gave way for people to basically say whatever they wanted about something, no matter how correct or incorrect it is. It is crazy because, a lot of the time, it was disinformation rather than unknowingly spreading misinformation. Hopefully, people will only get better in terms of their meme literacy. Because, memes will never go away, which means opportunities for disinformation are here to stay.
Hi Emily,
I loved going through your project and learning about the Infodemic and its relation to COVID-19. The use of memes of several seriousnesses was great going through since it not only helped support your argument but it was also something interesting to go through since some of them were ones that I had seen while others were new to me and it was interesting to see what information the meme was trying to convey. I especially liked the one that you said was the most serious in the series since it shows how much information can be manipulated in order to relay false information.
The Disinformation Dozen was something new that I learned about after looking at your presentation and it was interesting to learn that it was spread using mostly Facebook and Twitter as I knew that this false information was going around but learning more about it was something interesting to learn about.
I thought your project was very interesting and thought-provoking. Recently this class has caused me to ponder cultural rhetoric as a whole. Are our perceptions of the world show him defined by how humorous we find a particular topic? is the marketability of irony making us more indifferent to topics which should be handle with the highest of care? And the rhetoric of our generation is definitely a strange one, and by sheer magnitude it is way more powerful than the tools of communication any other generation had before.
The latter of meme-misinformation was wonderfully done as well and articulated your point perfectly. Overall a super enjoyable and light hearted piece on a grave and ever-so growing issue. Super fitting topic for the class!
I really enjoyed reading your project. I have never considered the implications of memes in spreading misinformation, especially during the pandemic. In terms of format, I really liked how you separated your paper in short sections. It helped to break up the text and kept me engaged throughout. I also liked how you included hyperlinks to your sources.
I find this topic so interesting! This reminds me of lectures on selective exposure in a few of my political science courses. People will only watch or read what confirms their current beliefs. This becomes very dangerous, as seen with the January 6th insurrection. I also can’t believe that Facebook promotes posts that elicit anger responses the most. This is extremely dangerous, like you stated. I really liked how you included the study by CCDH in which 12 individuals/organizations are responsible for 2/3 of the anti-vaccine rhetoric. Social media allows the spread of this information to individuals that would not take the time to fact check it or do more research on it.
I am so glad that you chose this topic because you carried out this project effortlessly. The topic is relevant to our online communities and pertinent as well, with an increasing political footprint for the average social-media user. Content wise, I found most interesting the distinction you made between disinformation and misinformation, which I hadn’t known of previously. With an increasingly social-media oriented political climate and campaign funding shifting towards Facebook and Instagram, it is important to have some basic knowledge on deciphering disinformation and misinformation embedded within the posts that we are so quick to share. I am curious as to how social media bubbles and algorithms cater to the spread of these dis-informative posts? A great elaborative piece building off your piece would be to explore the effect of these social media bubbles and how they further a certain political agenda through memes. Overall, some great ideas in your work and I appreciated the memes scattered throughout as well!
The first standout in your project is the section about how Facebooks algorithms favor the posts that get more traffic due to angrier comments. This makes me think about the third example in my project and how I feel he is someone who likes to stir the pot, but in a way almost has considering how the algorithms work.
To my knowledge, the last meme in your series on Covid with the percentages of the survival rates, those numbers are accurate, except for the last row which could have changed depending on when this was published––but this is just a side note.
I really enjoyed the section about the additional disinformation spreaders. It gave me a good laugh.
I felt as if this project did a solid job highlighting how easy it is for some to get swept up by memes. I’ve seen it left and right throughout this pandemic and have watched people close to me completely get lost in them.
After exploring Danny’s Instagram project, I thought it was pretty coincidental that I decided to look at yours right after. He discussed how healthcare professionals can spread misinformation through the Internet in the same way you did with memes. It’s almost funny to be comparing healthcare professionals to memes, yet they have a similar impact, carrying great weight to the general public.
I also greatly appreciated how you discussed the different types of memes that exist. So many people associate memes with humorous jokes, but those that discuss serious issues like COVID are just as important and deserve the same attention.
I really like the way you formatted your paper! Your paper had a mixture of seriousness and light-hearted things to read. The topic of misinformation nowadays is very relevant and important. Since almost everyone uses the internet, people find news through different types of social media. Young people to old people use social media and with the emergence of memes, information can spread really fast and quickly. The covid memes you gave can be very dangerous if the information is wrong. People could believe that they see on a meme is true and this can lead to misinformation between them and people they are around. Overall, I found your project to be very interesting and fun to read!
I liked how you discussed the positive and negative aspects of memes during the era of the COVID-19. I thought it was particularly notable because many people were spending a lot of time on social media in the early days of the pandemic when there was nothing else to do. I never thought about how memes could be used to spread mass mis and disinformation, so I thought that was also very interesting. I guess it just now comes with the territory of the internet, especially when communicating through memes is increasingly popular. This becomes increasingly dangerous and problematic when conspiracy theories co-opt the meme in order to further their personal agenda. I also liked how you described the difference between misinformation and disinformation because I know that I personally use the words interchangeably. The fact that disinformation involves an intent that might not be present in misinformation is so important because while the result might be the same, the intent is consequential. I think the distinction becomes even more important when information is increasingly being disseminated via social media. For instance, certain sites with a political agenda might post false information, and that post might be screenshotted and put into group chats without a second thought to the accuracy of what they’re sending. In that example, the results of the two are exactly the same, but the notion of intent is important in ascertaining blame and responsibility.
I like how your paper included different memes of varying seriousness. For example, the grumpy cat meme is fun and lighthearted, however COVID memes can be dangerous and can be used to spread misinformation. The easiness to create and share memes about COVID 19 has become extremely dangerous by making easier to spread misinformation. One of my favorite memes revolving COVID-19 has to do with Rudy Gobert. Rudy Gobert is a professional NBA player. When COVID first started, Rudy jokingly coughed and rubbed his hands all over a microphone at a press conference. It was later discovered that he tested positive for COVID and the entire NBA was shut down.
I also like how you differentiate disinformation and misinformation. Disinformation is false information that is used to persuade/influence public opinion. Misinformation is just the spread of false information the difference is the intent behind spreading false information. With all of this disinformation, is there a proposed way that we can combat it?
I found your topic to be very important, as memes spread false information constantly, and affect society. It is a relevant issue as it is pretty unavoidable, from young people looking on Instagram to older people on Facebook, the sharing of these memes is spread very easily and quickly. People are able to spread the information without doing more research, because they believe what is shown through the internet. It would have been interesting to see more information on how it is spread, whether people are more likely to reshare memes based on who posts or on the number of likes memes get. That would have helped give more clarity in correlation to the explanation of how the algorithms spread the disinformation.
I found the format and organization to be simple to follow, especially with the help of the pictures and hyperlinks. The hyperlinks were not too overwhelming, as we discussed in class prior, too many can take away from the piece itself. The memes helped give examples, to back up your statement, although more descriptions on the images themselves would have been more helpful for a reader to understand the point of them. The organization was done perfectly, because every time I found myself thinking of a question, it was answered within the following paragraph. Overall, it was a very relevant topic with good supporting details, both written and pictures.
I loved this! Very easy to read, you are an amazing writer! We both had similar projects so it’s nice to see a fellow meme lover, haha. What stuck me about this project was the organizational structure of the project. It made sure that an uniformed reader is introduced to and taught new terms as they arrive. Covid was ripe with misinformation, and I’m sure everyone here has had experience with family members holding on to bits of misinformation throughout the last year and half. I loved the way you drew an expressly straight line between how even inconspicuous memes can carry seeds of misinformation. It’s mind boggling that statistic where almost 2/3rds of anti vaccine misinformation online comes from only 12 people. Throughout the course of my research, I often had to come to terms with how powerful social media is in persuading people’s beliefs and what ends up sticking around in their head. It’s shocking to realize that so much power over belief is held by little more than a mere dozen of people who know how to leverage social media better than anyone else.
Before reading this project, I’ve never heard of disinformation. I didn’t know that there was a different term for spreading false information deliberately or accidentally. I like how the examples of certain types of memes were given after a short description about them in the “What is the role of memes?” section. Starting off with a meme in the introduction gives the paper a nice start as well. Also, the term “infodemic” is new to me, but I guess I knew what it was. I did notice that when everyone had to stay at home during the pandemic, people were sharing and reposting information much more often than before the pandemic. This occurred on places other than social media, like Whatsaap. For example, in my family group chats, people would send forwarded images and videos with information about covid-19 and other stuff. These images and videos would be forwarded from group to group so much that the message would say “forwarded many times”. I found this topic very relevant and the format allows the information to flow well.
Hi Emily,
I found your project engaging and informative, highlighting the darker side of memes and the sources of misinformation.
The covid meme examples you included were striking and effective. The “if masks work…” meme, especially showcases the danger that can come memes and the importance of being able to critically assess the credibility and logic behind memes.
I also was shocked to read about the “The Disinformation Dozen” being the main source of anti-vaccine propaganda. It demonstrates how negligent social media platforms have been in dealing with the problem. It would be easy for social media companies to enforce their policies against these individuals, as they so often do with issues of copyright infringement and community standard violations.
Hey Emily,
After reading some other projects, I was hoping someone would explore the influence of memes on spreading false information and I’m so glad you did! The text was broken up into digestible pieces, and the memes helped keep the audience engaged. I think it might be more effective if you increase the size of the images though since the text within them is so small and a little difficult to read. Otherwise, your project was very entertaining! Your tone right from the beginning of the text provoked excitement and suspense. Furthermore, you effectively balanced this more colloquial tone with a more serious one, which helped give the reader a moment to internalize the information they had just read.
Focusing the spread of false information on the pandemic successfully narrowed the direction of your topic enough to be specific without ruining its generalizability to other moments in time. Providing examples of disinformation by the Soviet Union helped with this. I think it would be interesting to include images of historical propaganda and compare them to political memes today. Overall, I think that the presentation of your topic was direct and concise. Great work!
I thought your topic was very prevalent in today’s society with a shift to the internet bigger than ever since the pandemic. It’s scary how memes can be made so easily and can contain a lot of misleading information. While most are meant to be taken as a joke, I feel like some may take it as the information to be partially true based on their own beliefs. Your addition of examples of the memes made me notice how some of them can actually look like an infographic which could actually motivate someone to continue spreading misinformation.
Furthermore, it was interesting to read about the differences between disinformation and misinformation. If I didn’t read your paper, I would’ve thought they would be synonyms. However, as I slowly understood the definitions of these terms, I was wondering if maybe the fact that misinformative memes (especially when it comes to COVID) could be a form of disinformation. While some may see them as comical and play them off as a joke, the creators of these memes may be using them as a source of quick information spreading.
Overall, I found your project to be interesting and easy to read. Much of the information you provided was straight to the point with the help of illustrations to guide us through your argument.
My favorite part about your project was how you built up your examples of memes in order of harmfulness to society. Many of us think of memes in a lighthearted way. This is how I looked at memes throughout most of my life. I’ve treated memes as jokes for the most part. What you did in this project is present a series of memes that slowly revealed just how dangerous memes can be for the spread of mis and disinformation. This was such an effective way of driving your point home. Even better is the fact that you further backed your claims with scientific evidence. The “Information Dozen” study was fascinating to learn about. It is disturbing to think that just twelve organization can do so much damage. Unfortunately, in my family, I have had to deal with many instances of mis and disinformation since the start of the pandemic. It has been fascinating yet unsettling to see how conspiracy theories have gradually eaten up a few of my family members, particularly one of my uncles. Before the pandemic, my uncle was pretty invested in the world of conspiracy theories. Yet I wouldn’t say that any of his wacky beliefs affected his life in a direct way. For example, my uncle has long held the belief that the government is spraying harmful chemicals out of airplanes in order to combat climate change (i.e. ‘chemtrails’). While this conspiracy might have caused my uncle some stress, I wouldn’t say it really affected his own life too much. More so, I would say it just made him skeptical of anything the government said or did. Flash forward to the outbreak of COVID-19, and my uncle’s wacky beliefs are directly affecting him as well as others. Not only is he putting himself in danger because of his disbelief in the COVID-19 vaccine, but he is also putting my older relatives at risk every time he sees them.
Your web-text does an amazing job of demonstrating this point in a scientific way. You lay out examples, cite relevant sources, and back your claims with strong argumentation. This was an excellent project!
The first paragraph hit too close to home. The pandemic was a time for people to spend more time online. This allowed things to go viral virtually every day. I also love that you already are talking about memes. With the pandemic, I realized the potential though, of our time being sprint online exponentially spreading misinformation. It’s crazy how our behavior became so radicalized now that we are back offline. I feel as though material and posts that are more extreme or radical tend to be shared more and spread more as well.
I love your section on memes. This was basically my project, talking about how memes are so much more than what they appear to be. They truly are a reflection of what is going on in our society. I can totally see how memes accessibility and readability added fuel to the infodemic fire. This gave clear opportunities for the spread of misinformation. However, this was basically always the case. Memes always gave way for people to basically say whatever they wanted about something, no matter how correct or incorrect it is. It is crazy because, a lot of the time, it was disinformation rather than unknowingly spreading misinformation. Hopefully, people will only get better in terms of their meme literacy. Because, memes will never go away, which means opportunities for disinformation are here to stay.
Hi Emily,
I loved going through your project and learning about the Infodemic and its relation to COVID-19. The use of memes of several seriousnesses was great going through since it not only helped support your argument but it was also something interesting to go through since some of them were ones that I had seen while others were new to me and it was interesting to see what information the meme was trying to convey. I especially liked the one that you said was the most serious in the series since it shows how much information can be manipulated in order to relay false information.
The Disinformation Dozen was something new that I learned about after looking at your presentation and it was interesting to learn that it was spread using mostly Facebook and Twitter as I knew that this false information was going around but learning more about it was something interesting to learn about.
Hey Emily,
I thought your project was very interesting and thought-provoking. Recently this class has caused me to ponder cultural rhetoric as a whole. Are our perceptions of the world show him defined by how humorous we find a particular topic? is the marketability of irony making us more indifferent to topics which should be handle with the highest of care? And the rhetoric of our generation is definitely a strange one, and by sheer magnitude it is way more powerful than the tools of communication any other generation had before.
The latter of meme-misinformation was wonderfully done as well and articulated your point perfectly. Overall a super enjoyable and light hearted piece on a grave and ever-so growing issue. Super fitting topic for the class!
Hi Emily,
I really enjoyed reading your project. I have never considered the implications of memes in spreading misinformation, especially during the pandemic. In terms of format, I really liked how you separated your paper in short sections. It helped to break up the text and kept me engaged throughout. I also liked how you included hyperlinks to your sources.
I find this topic so interesting! This reminds me of lectures on selective exposure in a few of my political science courses. People will only watch or read what confirms their current beliefs. This becomes very dangerous, as seen with the January 6th insurrection. I also can’t believe that Facebook promotes posts that elicit anger responses the most. This is extremely dangerous, like you stated. I really liked how you included the study by CCDH in which 12 individuals/organizations are responsible for 2/3 of the anti-vaccine rhetoric. Social media allows the spread of this information to individuals that would not take the time to fact check it or do more research on it.
Overall, you made an amazing project!
Hi Emily,
I am so glad that you chose this topic because you carried out this project effortlessly. The topic is relevant to our online communities and pertinent as well, with an increasing political footprint for the average social-media user. Content wise, I found most interesting the distinction you made between disinformation and misinformation, which I hadn’t known of previously. With an increasingly social-media oriented political climate and campaign funding shifting towards Facebook and Instagram, it is important to have some basic knowledge on deciphering disinformation and misinformation embedded within the posts that we are so quick to share. I am curious as to how social media bubbles and algorithms cater to the spread of these dis-informative posts? A great elaborative piece building off your piece would be to explore the effect of these social media bubbles and how they further a certain political agenda through memes. Overall, some great ideas in your work and I appreciated the memes scattered throughout as well!
Hey Emily,
The first standout in your project is the section about how Facebooks algorithms favor the posts that get more traffic due to angrier comments. This makes me think about the third example in my project and how I feel he is someone who likes to stir the pot, but in a way almost has considering how the algorithms work.
To my knowledge, the last meme in your series on Covid with the percentages of the survival rates, those numbers are accurate, except for the last row which could have changed depending on when this was published––but this is just a side note.
I really enjoyed the section about the additional disinformation spreaders. It gave me a good laugh.
I felt as if this project did a solid job highlighting how easy it is for some to get swept up by memes. I’ve seen it left and right throughout this pandemic and have watched people close to me completely get lost in them.
After exploring Danny’s Instagram project, I thought it was pretty coincidental that I decided to look at yours right after. He discussed how healthcare professionals can spread misinformation through the Internet in the same way you did with memes. It’s almost funny to be comparing healthcare professionals to memes, yet they have a similar impact, carrying great weight to the general public.
I also greatly appreciated how you discussed the different types of memes that exist. So many people associate memes with humorous jokes, but those that discuss serious issues like COVID are just as important and deserve the same attention.
I really like the way you formatted your paper! Your paper had a mixture of seriousness and light-hearted things to read. The topic of misinformation nowadays is very relevant and important. Since almost everyone uses the internet, people find news through different types of social media. Young people to old people use social media and with the emergence of memes, information can spread really fast and quickly. The covid memes you gave can be very dangerous if the information is wrong. People could believe that they see on a meme is true and this can lead to misinformation between them and people they are around. Overall, I found your project to be very interesting and fun to read!
Emily,
I liked how you discussed the positive and negative aspects of memes during the era of the COVID-19. I thought it was particularly notable because many people were spending a lot of time on social media in the early days of the pandemic when there was nothing else to do. I never thought about how memes could be used to spread mass mis and disinformation, so I thought that was also very interesting. I guess it just now comes with the territory of the internet, especially when communicating through memes is increasingly popular. This becomes increasingly dangerous and problematic when conspiracy theories co-opt the meme in order to further their personal agenda. I also liked how you described the difference between misinformation and disinformation because I know that I personally use the words interchangeably. The fact that disinformation involves an intent that might not be present in misinformation is so important because while the result might be the same, the intent is consequential. I think the distinction becomes even more important when information is increasingly being disseminated via social media. For instance, certain sites with a political agenda might post false information, and that post might be screenshotted and put into group chats without a second thought to the accuracy of what they’re sending. In that example, the results of the two are exactly the same, but the notion of intent is important in ascertaining blame and responsibility.