How deep-pocketed political donors invest in meme production to sway the masses, with some Dems trying to catch up by funding their own viral content studios
Imagine you're a millionaire or billionaire with strong political views and a desire to spread those views to the masses. Tweets: @mims , @patprobably , and @tonyromm Tweets: Christopher Mims / @mims : Larger story of the age of memes: Soft power shifted from Hollywood (liberal) to Facebook (conservative) http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Patrick / @patprobably : he whomst'd've controls the memes controls the universe http://twitter.com/... Tony Romm / @tonyromm : Real good, important story here. I'd add: official Dem/GOP organs themselves have tried, and will invest even more, in doing this, too. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This story sits at the start of a documented arc: by 2016, [[a:873576|activist-run Facebook pages were already matching the reach of MSNBC and the New York Times without any journalistic standard]], which is exactly the opening deep-pocketed donors learned to buy into. The right side industrialized first — [[a:940332|CarpeDonktum showed how a single pro-Trump meme account could blur trolling into a political business]] — leaving Democrats playing catch-up with funded content studios of their own.
What changed by this piece is that meme production stopped being an organic activist phenomenon and became a donor-funded procurement category. Tony Romm's added note that official party organs themselves have tried and will invest even more signals the parties are treating viral content as core infrastructure, not fringe experimentation.
First-order effects
- Donor money now buys direct reach past party organs and legacy media: a millionaire can commission shareable content that lands in feeds alongside news from established brands, with no editorial gatekeeping in between.
- Democratic donors funding their own studios enter a bidding contest for the same scarce asset — meme accounts with proven distribution, like the Occupy Democrats page that regularly outperformed Trump and Fox News pages.
Second-order effects
- Meme creators professionalize and formalize: the path runs from lone posters to agencies brokering sponsored posts, as when [[a:950552|the Bloomberg campaign hired Meme 2020, led by Jerry Media's CEO, to place sponsored content on influential Instagram accounts]].
- Facebook becomes the decisive intermediary — its feed algorithms determine which purchased memes travel, giving the platform de facto power over how effectively any donor's spend converts into persuasion.
Third-order effects
- Political influence consolidates around whoever controls distribution rather than whoever produces content: Christopher Mims frames it as soft power shifting from Hollywood to Facebook, meaning platform design choices now shape electoral messaging more than studio craft does.
- Campaigning converges on influencer economics across every format — down-ballot candidates already resemble influencers as campaigns move fully online (per The Verge's reporting on improvised digital campaigning), and TikTok's emerging meme scene shows multi-platform meme brands extending the same playbook to new audiences.
The trend: Political persuasion is migrating from broadcast-era media institutions to donor-funded, platform-native viral content, with both parties and their funders racing to professionalize meme production as a standing campaign capability.