These are the memes your tax dollars paid for.

What's behind the government's memes?

What’s behind the government’s memes?

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We need to talk about the memes your tax dollars paid for. What is the federal government trying to communicate with them?

The social media accounts of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security have been chock-full of memes: memes that mock people being deported, memes that are aimed at recruiting new ICE agents, even a meme that seemingly references a book by a white supremacist. To get into who these memes are speaking to and what story they’re trying to tell, Brittany sits down with NPR correspondent Shannon Bond and Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute.

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This episode was produced by Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from David Greenburg. Our Supervising Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our Executive Producer is Veralyn Williams. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.