2017 article
Is America Prepared for Meme Warfare?
Memes function like IEDs.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xyvwdk/meme-warfare
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https://www.stratcomcoe.org/jeff-giesea-its-time-embrace-memetic-warfare
Jeff Giesea. It’s time to embrace memetic warfare.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_warfare
United States presidential election, 2016
Memetic warfare on the part of 4chan and The_Donald sub-reddit is widely credited with assisting Donald Trump in winning the election in an event they call 'The Great Meme War'. According to Ben Schreckinger, "a group of anonymous keyboard commandos conquered the internet for Donald Trump—and plans to deliver Europe to the far right."[6]
In a 2018 study, a team that analyzed a 160M image dataset discovered that the 4chan message board /pol/ and sub-reddit r/The_Donald were particularly effective at spreading memes. They found that /pol/ substantially influences the meme ecosystem by posting a large number of memes, while r/The_Donald is the most efficient community in pushing memes to both fringe and mainstream web communities.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_warfare