Analysts Suggest Memes Mocking The Taliban May Be Doing Their PR Work

The Taliban offensive in Afghanistan has been the hot topic in U.S. politics for weeks now, and with all hot topics came the inevitable: memes. Photos soon circulated of the Taliban in the evacuated Afghani capital soon circulated on social media, but alongside the photos of destruction came a curious series of photos of the Taliban acting relatively "normal."

One particularly viral image showed a group of Taliban soldiers eating ice cream. Another shows the soldiers working out and laughing in an abandoned gym. One Twitter user claimed to own the Taliban with a ligma joke.

After playing bumper cars, the #Taliban were seen having ice creams in #Kabul on Thu, which some netizens said reminded them of US President Joe Biden, who also likes ice cream. pic.twitter.com/mJE3lphGzx

— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) August 19, 2021

Taliban apparently took over this gym somewhere in #Afghanistan……I'm just leaving this video here without any other comment. 🙈

pic.twitter.com/UcvdIvmqD9

— FJ (@Natsecjeff) July 14, 2021

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A post shared by Funny Memes (@funnymemes)

Myriad other videos of Taliban jubilation such as these have spread through social media, which, though they are likely not part of the Taliban's effort to rebrand themselves as compassionate leaders in the eyes of the west, could nevertheless be helping humanize and legitimize the organization.

ISIS researcher Joe Whittaker of Swansea University told Business Insider that the viral videos may be doing more harm than the people sharing them intend.

"I'm minded to think back to a piece of research my colleague was involved in where they looked at ISIS magazines on Twitter," said Whittaker "They found the people trying to deliberately spread propaganda with the intention of radicalizing or recruiting was vastly outweighed by what you might call 'useful idiots' with a negative tagline just spraying it around social media."

Furthermore, memes about the Taliban could be warming them up to the American right. The Daily Beast documented how Gen Z alt-right memers have found themselves reveling in the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan with various Chad memes. Alt-right figurehead Nicholas Fuentes even posted on Gab saying, "The Taliban is going to ban abortion, vaccines, and gay marriage… maybe we were fighting on the wrong side for 20 years."

There is certainly historical precedence for how memeing, even so-called ironic memeing, can play a part in lending a political figure legitimacy, and the memeing of the Taliban has worried those opposed to their rule.

"It's like this willful ignorance of what is going to happen to that country and what is going to happen to those people," said Hussein Kesvani of University College London. Whittaker put it more bluntly:

"People think they're being funny and it may have a humanizing effect."