Historically, the public faces of state and city governments have maintained a manicured image, offering their constituents PSAs and schedules in a clean-cut format meant to be informative and little else.<\/p>\n
That isn’t the case for the state of New York, whose official social media presence has increasingly become a destination for nonsensical memes.<\/p>\n
While an extreme weather forecast could normally be expected to be presented succinctly, compellingly and self-seriously, the state Instagram account @NYGov took a very different approach in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cWE GOTTA RESPECT MOTHER NATURE\u2019S THING,\u201d the account captioned a digitally edited image of a Furby<\/a> wearing bunny ears in a snowstorm. Elsewhere in the same carousel, a grimacing blue being appeared alongside the number to text for real-time weather updates, along with wind chill predictions from the National Weather Service.<\/p>\n Another era of taxpayers might have balked at an official arm of the state promoting meaningless, agenda-less content<\/a> like viral baby hippo Moo Deng photoshopped in front of an Olive Garden, but in 2026, the message of nonsensical delight deeply resonates with young voters\u2019 nihilistic senses of humor. The most bizarre content often appears to get the highest engagement.<\/p>\n \u201cI noticed that the weirder the posts, the better it would perform, and therefore the more people would see really important government information,\u201d said Milly Czerwinski, the 27-year-old who has run (and strange-ified) @NYGov for a little more than 10 months.<\/p>\n Czerwinski calls her social media strategy the \u201c’Sesame Street’ approach\u201d in that it makes learning practical information fun. Users don\u2019t generally scroll social media looking for \u201cinformation about free school meals or that you may be eligible for heating and cooling assistance,” she said. “You\u2019re probably looking for funny Reels to send your friends.”<\/p>\n Now, the two are one and the same.<\/p>\n The inexplicable style of messaging has resonated with constituents as well as their elected representatives. Various state senators, state assemblymembers and city councilmembers have shared the account\u2019s posts, sometimes with messages like \u201cWhat is going on? What the heck is this?\u201d The charity No Kid Hungry commented \u201cFEED THE KIDS, GLORY TO WORD ART\u201d on a nonsensical post about free school meals.<\/p>\n Czerwinski said she believes the strategy is so successful because, even in a profoundly desensitized and jaded age, the extreme contrast of deranged memes and banal government information is still surprising.<\/p>\n She said she’s noticed more public sector accounts embracing the aesthetic over the past two years, including the Portland Water Bureau<\/a>, Utah Department of Transportation<\/a>, Amtrak<\/a>, NYC Ferry<\/a> and the state of New Jersey<\/a> (the profile image for which is currently Baby Yoda holding a yellow outline of the Garden State), as well as many Trump administration-related accounts.<\/p>\n Previously, beginning around 2016, New York City’s Conflicts of Interest Board maintained a humorous Twitter profile<\/a>. A few years later, the city Department of Sanitation also started dabbling in the art of meme-nicipality on its TikTok<\/a> page. Both accounts stopped operating in 2023, and neither were as off the wall as @NYGov or the NYC Ferry’s accounts, which are particularly weird.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to get your brand\u2019s messaging out there, you have to be part of the cultural zeitgeist,\u201d said Franky Ponce, who manages the ferry\u2019s social media pages. He\u2019s found great engagement success and received much praise from riders for the accounts\u2019 zany content, or \u201cedutainment,\u201d as he calls it.<\/p>\n Ponce insists the purpose of it all \u2014 posts of a ferry wearing Timbs, a Yankees hat and an NYC Ferry-branded jacket<\/a>, or of a nonsense acrostic poem about snow<\/a> that includes an anthropomorphized ferry shooting flames at a yeti \u2014 is to better inform riders.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a difficult feat in an informational ecosystem where everything is battling against everything else for limited attention.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s been this kind of flattening where everyone’s competing in exactly the same space,\u201d said Jason Eppink, assistant professor of digital media at Elmhurst University. On social platforms, we go from seeing a friend\u2019s dog to possible war crimes to a meme about the state of New York all in the same newsfeed, all in rapid succession.<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s a very, very new phenomenon in human existence, that those ideas and emotions are juxtaposed,\u201d Eppink said.<\/p>\n