Despite the rapid growth of video-based memes, their actual influence on politics remains underexplored. This study investigates how political memes on TikTok affected the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Using a mixed-methods design, we combined expert evaluations of meme content (N = 121) and a survey experiment (N = 240) to assess the roles of humor level, knowledge quality, and candidate focus in affecting political outcomes. Structural equation modeling revealed that humor level significantly increased political engagement intention but had a negative direct effect on attitude change, while knowledge quality directly promoted attitude change. We also found that political cynicism moderated these effects: among cynical individuals, highly humorous memes more strongly boosted political engagement intention. Polarization analysis highlights that in-party memes reinforce existing beliefs, and Trump-focused or high knowledge quality content sways independent audiences. This study explores the complex dynamics of video-based memes, contributing to the understanding of digital media’s role in political processes.
AdigaPGPadmakumarK (2024) Humor, politics and the global north: a systematic literature review of internet memes. Internet Reference Services Quarterly28: 1–19.
2.
AhmedSMasoodM (2024) Breaking barriers with memes: how memes bridge political cynicism to online political participation. Social Media + Society10(2): 20563051241261277.
3.
AlAfnanMA (2025) The role of memes in shaping political discourse on social media. Studies in Media and Communication13(2): 1.
4.
AliSWHusainN (2024) Humor in digital discourse: a pragmatic analysis of memes on social media. Madani: Jurnal Ilmiah Multidisiplin2(3): 72–81.
5.
AttardoS (2024) Humor in the age of the internet: the case of transmedial humor. Traduction et Langues23(2): 22–33.
6.
BaumMA (2003) Soft News Goes to War. Princeton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
7.
BaumgartnerJMorrisJS (2006) The daily show effect: candidate evaluations, efficacy, and American youth. American Politics Research34(3): 341–367.
8.
BergerAA (2025) Trump’s tirades or: destroying the golem. Media, Populism and Hate Speech6: 317.
9.
BonneauCWCannDM (2015) Party identification and vote choice in partisan and nonpartisan elections. Political Behavior37: 43–66.
10.
BoukesMBoomgaardenHG (2015) Soft news with hard consequences? Introducing a nuanced measure of soft versus hard news exposure and its relationship with political cynicism. Communication Research42(5): 701–731.
11.
BülowLJohannM (2023) Effects and perception of multimodal recontextualization in political internet memes. Evidence from two online experiments in Austria. Frontiers in Communication7: 1027014.
12.
ChangHCHShamanBChenYC, et al. (2024). Generative memesis: AI mediates political memes in the 2024 USA presidential election. arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.00934.
13.
DafaureM (2020) The “great meme war:” The alt-right and its multifarious enemies. Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World10: 1–28.
14.
DavisJLLoveTPKillenG (2018) Seriously funny: the political work of humor on social media. New Media & Society20(10): 3898–3916.
15.
DawkinsR (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16.
De LeonFMGBallesteros-LintaoR (2021) The rise of meme culture: internet political memes as tools for analysing Philippine propaganda. Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature2(4): 1–13.
17.
De-OliveiraMde AlmeidaCMMainardesEW (2022) Politics and social media: an analysis of factors anteceding voting intention. International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing19(2): 309–332.
18.
DenisovaA (2019) Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts. New York: Routledge.
19.
DiehlTWeeksBEGil de ZúñigaH (2016) Political persuasion on social media: tracing direct and indirect effects of news use and social interaction. New Media & Society18(9): 1875–1895.
DowBJ (2017) Taking Trump seriously: persona and presidential politics in 2016. Women's Studies in Communication40(2): 136–139.
22.
EdouardLOkonofuaF (2024) Health aspects of the presidential election in the United States. African Journal of Reproductive Health28(8): 10–13.
23.
FeldmanL (2011) The opinion factor: the effects of opinionated news on information processing and attitude change. Political Communication28(2): 163–181.
24.
FlindersM (2020) Why feelings trump facts: anti-politics, citizenship and emotion. Emotions and Society2(1): 21–40.
25.
GalNShifmanLKampfZ (2016) “It gets better”: internet memes and the construction of collective identity. New Media & Society18(8): 1698–1714.
26.
GalipeauT (2023) The impact of political memes: a longitudinal field experiment. Journal of Information Technology & Politics20(4): 437–453.
HamedDMAlqurashiN (2025) Impact vs. vision: a critical discourse analysis of Trump and Harris’ leadership rhetoric in the 2024 presidential election. Frontiers in Communication10: 1541513.
29.
HasanAF (2024) Analysis of the verbal humor in trump’s speech in the election campaign: semantic study. Journal of The Iraqi University69(2): 592–598.
30.
HerrmannRK (2017) How attachments to the nation shape beliefs about the world: a theory of motivated reasoning. International Organization71(S1): S61–S84.
31.
HolbertRLLambeJLDudoAD, et al. (2007) Primacy effects of the daily show and national TV news viewing: young viewers, political gratifications, and internal political self-efficacy. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media51(1): 20–38.
32.
HossainNKrummJGamonM, et al. (2020). Semeval-2020 task 7: assessing humor in edited news headlines. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.00304.
JenkinsES (2014) The modes of visual rhetoric: circulating memes as expressions. Quarterly Journal of Speech100(4): 442–466.
35.
Jones-JangSMKimDHKenskiK (2021) Perceptions of mis-or disinformation exposure predict political cynicism: evidence from a two-wave survey during the 2018 US midterm elections. New Media & Society23(10): 3105–3125.
36.
JournellW (2024) Tackling trump: contemporary politics and the creation of official knowledge. The Social Studies116: 1–13.
37.
KeohaneJIcksMShiraevESamoilenkoS (2025) Character Assassination in Politics. In: SamoilenkoS.ASSimmons (eds). The Handbook of Social and Political Conflict. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 281–290.
38.
KimH (2015) Perception and emotion: the indirect effect of reported election poll results on political participation intention and support for restrictions. Mass Communication & Society18(3): 303–324.
39.
KimYCollierJRMurrayC, et al. (2023) Partisan memes as a catalyst for homophilous networks. Political Communication40(6): 768–787.
40.
KnuckeyJMathewsA (2024) Racial resentment, sexism, and evaluations of Kamala Harris in the 2020 US presidential election. Social Science Quarterly105(4): 1266–1279.
41.
KubeyRLarsonR (1990) The use and experience of the new video media among children and young adolescents. Communication Research17(1): 107–130.
42.
KulkarniA (2017) Internet meme and political discourse: a study on the impact of internet meme as a tool in communicating political satire. Journal of Content, Community & Communication Amity School of Communication6: 13–17.
43.
LankshearCKnobelM (2019) Memes, macros, meaning, and menace: some trends in internet memes. Journal of Communication and Media Studies4(4): 43–57.
44.
LeeperTJSlothuusR (2014) Political parties, motivated reasoning, and public opinion formation. Political Psychology35: 129–156.
45.
LiteratIBoxman-ShabtaiLKligler-VilenchikN (2023) Protesting the protest paradigm: tiktok as a space for media criticism. The International Journal of Press/Politics28(2): 362–383.
46.
MagazzùG (2025) The political speeches of Kamala Harris: A linguistic analysis. In: SileoA.MagazzuG. (eds). Adapting alterity in Anglophone scenarios. Wilmington: Vernon Press, 115–131.
McLoughlinLSouthernR (2021) By any memes necessary? Small political acts, incidental exposure and memes during the 2017 UK general election. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations23(1): 60–84.
49.
MinaAX (2019) Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power. Boston: Beacon Press.
50.
MolinaMD (2020) What makes an internet meme a meme? Six essential characteristics. In: JosephsonSKellyJDSmithK (eds). Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media. New York: Routledge, 380–394.
51.
MorreallJ (2014) Humor, philosophy and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory46(2): 120–131.
52.
MortensenMNeumayerC (2021) The playful politics of memes. Information, Communication & Society24(16): 2367–2377.
53.
NilsenDL (1990) The social functions of political humor. Journal of Popular Culture24(3): 35–47.
54.
PettyRECacioppoJT (2012) Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. New York: Springer-Verlag.
55.
RoseN (1998) Controversies in meme theory. Journal of Memetics Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission2(1): 43.
56.
RossASRiversDJ (2017) Digital cultures of political participation: internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 US presidential candidates. Discourse, Context & Media16: 1–11.
57.
RosvallyD (2025) Weaponized virality: the harris campaign’s TikTok dramaturgy. Public Humanities1: e23.
58.
SchiazzaG (2022) Political internet memes and political learning: An experimental approach [Conference session]. In Workshop Proceedings of the 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/pdf/2022_41.pdf
59.
ShifmanL (2013) Memes in a digital world: reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication18(3): 362–377.
60.
ShifmanL (2013) Memes in Digital Culture. Boston: MIT press.
61.
SohWY (2020) Digital protest in Singapore: The pragmatics of political Internet memes. Media, Culture & Society42(7–8): 1115–1132.
62.
TandonSSinghNVTripathiD (2022) Like, share and comment: Gen-z and political memes on social media. Special Education1: 43.
63.
TesnohlidkovaO (2021) Humor and satire in politics: introducing cultural sociology to the field. Sociology Compass15(1): e12842.
64.
TheocharisYJungherrA (2021) Computational social science and the study of political communication. Political Communication38(1-2): 1–22.
65.
TownerTL (2013) All political participation is socially networked? New media and the 2012 election. Social Science Computer Review31(5): 527–541.
66.
VössingK (2021) The quality of political information. Political Studies Review19(4): 574–590.
67.
WimsattWC (1999) Genes, memes, and cultural heredity. Biology and Philosophy14: 279–310.
68.
XieLNatsevAKenderJR, et al(2011) Visual memes in social media: tracking real-world news in youtube videos. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Scottsdale Arizona USA,28November 2011- 1 December2011, 53–62.
69.
YamamotoMKushinMJDalisayF (2017) Social media and political disengagement among young adults: A moderated mediation model of cynicism, efficacy, and social media use on apathy. Mass Communication and Society20(2): 149–168.
70.
YoungDG (2008) The privileged role of the late-night joke: exploring humor’s role in disrupting argument scrutiny. Media Psychology11(1): 119–142.
71.
YoungDG (2019) Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States. London: Oxford University Press.
72.
ZallerJ (1993) The converse‐McGuire model of attitude change and the gulf war opinion rally. Political Communication10(4): 369–388.
73.
ZengJSchäferMSAllgaierJ (2021) Research perspectives on TikTok & its legacy apps| reposting “Till Albert Einstein is TikTok famous”: the memetic construction of science on TikTok. International Journal of Communication15: 32.
74.
ZidaniSMoranR (2021) Memes and the spread of misinformation: establishing the importance of media literacy in the era of information disorder. Teaching Media Quarterly9(1): 1–16.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
