About

My Political Views In 2016 vs. My Political Views Now is an image caption meme format in which users pair two images together, one representing their political views in 2016 and the other representing their current political views, with the catchphrase. The images are frequently historical figures, pieces of propaganda, works of art or pictures of the person themselves in 2016 or in current times. Usually, the photos attest to a transformation because they are very different from each other.

Origin

The earliest post showing the trend was made on June 12th, 2023, on Twitter by user @UBERSOY1, and it received just over 50 likes in roughly 48 hours (seen below). Unlike the majority of later memes using the catchphrase setup, this meme did not feature two different images, but rather just one.^[1]

Precursors to the meme format notably existed earlier, with "My Political Views In 2016 vs. Now" sharing similarities to the My Political Views Are Whatever This Is meme, spreading in a comparable manner (on Twitter, largely through quote-tweets) and using the same setup (pairing a catchphrase with different comparison images).

Other precursors using a similar concept include this TikTok, posted on July 28th, 2022, which represents the 2016 political views and the present political views as two different Wojaks (seen below). The meme (shown below) received almost 12,000 likes in roughly one year.^[2]

Spread

The meme spread through various quote-tweet chains over the course of June 12th-14th, 2023. Prominent posts seemed to come from both the left and the right, with some of them sincerely representing a shift.

For example, on June 13th, 2023, Twitter user @ExquisiteRebel posted a version (seen below, left) that received over 3,100 likes in less than 24 hours.^[4] Some were also more goofy, like the post (seen below, right) made by @myth_pilot on June 14th, which earned almost 3,200 likes in a similar timeframe.^[3]

Various Examples

External References