Articles for ielts the dangers of being over-confident

participation among millennials, even suggesting that greater exposure to memes 
was positively related to participation. More recently, the Ukrainian government 
began publishing memes on its official Twitter account in the lead up to the war with 
Russia as a way to gather popular support. One meme, posted in November 2021, 
used humour to publicly undermine Russia's denial of its plan to attack Ukraine. 
Another used a lighthearted headache meme to communicate the stress of being a 
neighbour to Russia. Although simple and humorous, these memes encouraged 
thousands of people to participate in a conversation about the disturbing reality of 
the impending war. In the US, researchers Mia Moody-Ramirez and Andrew 
Church, explored Facebook memes during the 2016 Presidential Election. In 
general, they found Facebook meme pages about presidential candidates, Donald 
Trump and Hilary Clinton, had a negative tone. Trump-memes were more likely to 
reference his hairstyle and facial expressions, whereas Clinton-memes referenced 
her email scandal and relationships. The authors suggest that grassroots meme-
culture allows everyday people to bypass the mainstream media, which has 

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historically been a "gatekeeper" of political themes and discourse in presidential 
campaigns. Now, creators of memes (both citizens and candidates) have the power 
to share ideas with a vast online audience, shape political conversations, and 
ultimately, influence voting decisions. Unsurprisingly, we're more likely to share 
memes consistent with our political views and we also tend to subject political 
memes to greater scrutiny than those that are non-political. But as well as adding to 
the din we are exposed to on social media, political memes offer a subversive means 
to challenge dominant discourses of authoritarian governments. Gerbaudo says the 
use of memes "as a means of political contestation, is coloured by the prevalence of 
sarcasm and irony, which is very common to memes, exposing the weakness, or 
vileness, or stupidity of the enemy, poking fun at excessive pompousness, excessive 
arrogance of the powerful". But they can also be used as vehicles for anger and 
political discontent. Digital activism in the form of memes is an important form of 
expression for people living within oppressive regimes where overt anti-
establishment debate is unacceptable in mainstream media. One research study 
found satirical memes posted on Moroccan Facebook pages that were ostentatiously 
defined as "just for fun" or "entertainment" actually led to subversive political 
conversations about the monarchy, which ultimately encouraged political 
participation. Of course, in more authoritarian political regimes, there's always a 
chance that subversive political memes are censored one way or another, such as the 
Winnie the Pooh meme that mocked Chinese President Xi Jinping and was believed 
to be behind the ban of a Disney live action film adaptation of the Winnie the Pooh 
books, Christopher Robin. In an article published in the Journal of Visual Culture, 
technologist and writer An Xiao Mina suggests political memes in China are covertly 
subversive in order to dodge scrutiny from human or machine-powered state censors. 
Carefully embedding activist messages in simple imagery, like a cute cat or a llama, 
can disguise these memes as trivial, apolitical content that are less likely to get 
flagged and blocked, she argues. "In today's world, memes are the seeds from which 
social movements grow," Xiao Mina says in her book Memes to Movements. "But 
to flower, they must find their homes in the fertile ground of minds and cultures."In 
some cases protestors are taking internet meme culture back onto the streets, such as 
in Myanmar and the 2017 Women's March on Washington in the US, in an attempt 
to use the humour and imagery they have honed on social media to drive their point 
home. During Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, memes were also used by both 
anti-government and pro-government activists to spread ideas, according to research 
by Anastasia Denisova, a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of 
Westminster and author of a book on internet memes and society. She says they 

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provided a powerful form of alternative discourse outside of the "restricted Russian 
media ecology" Shifman highlights that memes are used as political devices on all 
sides of a debate. "[Memes] unsettle power balances and allow normal people to 
express their voice, to express their anxieties," she says. "On the other hand… 
memes could also be forces of governments, they're now used by powerful 
corporations, they're also used by extremists of all kinds." But memes can have an 
even darker side – helping to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories that can 
have impacts in the real world, as became apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. 
Rather than being a way to present elaborate theories, memes have been described 
as offering "bite-sized" conspiracies that can be repeated, adapted and widely shared. 
In the case of Covid-19, many of the conspiracy memes that surfaced were attempts 
to fill gaps in knowledge as the pandemic unfolded. "If you don't know enough, you 
will fill the gaps, with whatever knowledge you can find," says Alexander Jack, a 
forensic psychologist at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust 
who studied how Covid-19 conspiracy memes spread among mental health patients. 
For those with mental health issues, conspiracy memes may be more problematic, 
warns co-researcher and forensic psychiatrist, Reena Panchal. "If you're a vulnerable 
person, and you find someone or a group of people who share your views, you 
immediately feel a sense of belonging, and that kind of adds strength to your beliefs," 
she says.But while memes spread and shapeshift at a lightning rate, can we expect 
them to hang around as a form of expression in the future? "This format of 
communication is here to stay because it's a very stable way of expressing your 
individuality and your communality," says Shifman. Gerbaudo notes that memes are 
already evolving – branching out more into video sharing. "TikTok videos are 
memetic in character," he says. "They respond to challenges, which have a certain 
format, where people need to kind of play with a given, pre-established set of 
interactions." But whether memes are a force for "good" or "bad", is largely down 
to how we choose to use them. "They're neutral modes of communication," says 
Galip. "You can make meaning out of memes depending on what you want to 
express." What's clear is that the modest meme should not be underestimated. They 
conceal complexity and culture beneath their simple exterior. Online, memes are 
important facilitators of communication, belonging, and digital activism, that can 
both unite and divide us, depending on who we are and how we participate with 
them.