by Tyler Fransen

Memes: a way of saying, “I’m a slave to internet trends that distort pop culture, and I also spend way too much time on Facebook.” If you need your daily fix of the dankest of memes, congratulations, you are the problem.

Now look, I enjoy my memes like I enjoy my buffalo wings: spicy but manageable. Sure I’ll laugh at the Obama/Biden bromance memes all day, and yes, there is a fair amount of information I receive from Facebook in the form of a single frame from an otherwise obsolete movie.

But memes have gotten way out of control lately, and have strayed away from their original intent. Memes used to be nothing more than simple satire. A commentary on mundane life. Humour that exposes the absurdity of the human condition is as American as apple pie, bell bottom jeans and whatever that thing is on Trump’s head.

Nowadays, memes are either clusters of paragraphs that hardly anyone can read, they’re so obscure the average American, like myself, is dumbfounded or they’re stolen.

“This has me dead,” “who did this,” “watch until the end,” and then a hundred laughing while crying emojis are usually the tell tale sign that this meme you’ve consumed is, in fact, someone else’s stolen intellectual property. No, this instance does not fall under fair use.

And it’s not just memes: reactions, compilations, reaction compiliations and compilations of reaction compilations are all someone else taking advantage of a broken copyright system that no one knows how to enforce. The biggest culprits are SoFloAntonio, Unilad, the Fat Jewish and people who just started learning photoshop.

And let me be clear, memes themselves do fall under fair use because they’re either satire, parody or commentary. Memes that someone else has taken and put bars around with enough emojis to make a basic girl spill her chai do not fall under fair use. Why? Because they were taken from someone else without citing the original source or without the original source being so obvious from the picture or video itself.

Oh, and lest we forget the political memes that circulated our news feeds this year. Every waking moment it was crooked Hillary, Bernie the socialist, Trump the con-man, or Rubio’s battle with dehydration. Political memes were everywhere. Nevermind the fact that these were clogging most of my Facebook feed, they were also factually inaccurate most of the time.

Whenever you hear someone talk about how fake news ruined their lives, they’re talking about misinformed memes that were then turned into a long form article with no credible sources. Then posted to a website surrounded by a bunch of advertisements; perpetuating the cycle of fake news being spread across the internet with clickbait-y headlines.

So please America, as we continue on this bizarre journey called life, through the wondrous vehicle of the internet, double check your memes. Make sure, if it’s a meme that’s trying to persuade you, to double check its facts and see what the information is actually saying. If the meme has bars around it with crappy emojis and someone’s random Twitter handle it’s probably been stolen, and it needs to be cited by the original source.

Lastly, and I cannot say this enough; if I see one more godforsaken, “Bee Movie but every time they say bee X happens,” meme on YouTube I will personally shut down the Internet for every American household until those responsible apologize for the gaudy monstrosity that they have unleashed. Are we clear?