Did social media ruin Ted Cruz's campaign?

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[Commentary] “Skewered by social media memes” is the essential story of the Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) campaign, and the gleeful and prolific satires of the ordinary citizens’ online community surely played a role in exaggerating the candidate’s inherent strangeness, sketching him as a grotesque figure vulnerable to his rivals.

For the first time in a US election cycle, community-generated memes have grown to play a significant role in political discourse, similar to the classic printed cartoon. The anarchic, youth-led online shorthand – which can encompass images with text captions, familiar iconography repurposed in multiple contexts, or even short animations such as gifs and Vines – is no longer just for young people on image boards and in closed groups. In fact, it may even be a sign of how politically engaged young people are today: they’re generating their own image-based political satires. In these memes, the political figure is exaggerated, his context made grotesque or fantastical, just as in traditional political cartooning.


Did social media ruin Ted Cruz's campaign?