Sh*tposting as Political Practice: Why Low-Effort Noise Became High-Impact Power
Scroll through any comment thread and you will see it: the baffling collage of crudely edited images, the joke that is not funny, the cartoon frog, the intentionally misspelled insult, the post that exists to provoke rather than inform. We call it shitposting or trashposting. Once a kind of chaotic art born in anonymous image boards, it has mutated into a strategic tool of public life. It looks like nonsense and often is, but it is also an instrument of persuasion, a culture machine, and in some corners, a weapon.
To understand why this matters we have to do two things at once. First we must take a clinical look at what shitposting is and what motivates people who do it. Then we must trace how that behaviour scales into group tactics, how platform architecture amplifies it, and why it has become a go-to tactic for certain political actors, especially on the right.
What counts as shitposting
At base, shitposting is the deliberate production of low quality, absurd, ironic, or offensive online content intended to provoke a reaction. It is not merely bad humour. It is often designed to derange discussion, to sidetrack reasoned debate, and to reward the creator with virality for minimal effort. The practice emerged from the anarchic ethos of early imageboards and forums where chaos itself was prized. That origin still explains a lot of what makes shitposts work today, including their appeal as a kind of in-group signalling and their insistence on absurdity rather than argument.
Who shitposts and why
There is no single personality that explains all shitposting. For some users it is play, a form of irreverence and performance. For others it is attention seeking. But psychological research gives us a pattern that is hard to miss. Online trolling and closely related behaviour are reliably associated with what psychologists call the Dark Tetrad: sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. People who score high on these traits are more likely to enjoy the reactions of others, to derive pleasure from provocation, and to exploit the anonymity of the internet to act without immediate social cost. That pattern is robust across multiple studies and reviews.
Beyond individual pathology there are ordinary mechanisms that make shitposting attractive. The internet offers low friction and immediate feedback. A deliberately absurd meme can be shared, remixed, and amplified far more easily than a carefully sourced essay. Social reward systems on platforms value speed and emotional engagement more than nuance. The result is a powerful incentive mismatch: produce something outrageous and you might get likes, shares, and followers even if the content is factually vacuous.
There is also a psychological relief function. People use humour and absurdity to cope with anxiety and powerlessness. Turning threats into jokes is a classic defence. But jokes can also normalize cruelty. When mockery becomes the dominant mode of engagement, boundaries shift and the threshold for what counts as acceptable public behaviour falls. Research warns that humour and derision can act as a back door for more extreme ideas, because people can claim plausible deniability under the guise of irony. The Security Distillery
From single posts to group culture
Shitposting is rarely just individual mischief. When reposted and remixed it becomes an engine of identity and group formation. Memes compress identity into a single image or phrase. They let people say, with little investment, that they are part of a group that sees the world a certain way. The in-group gets the joke and the outgroup becomes the butt of ridicule. That function makes shitposting a social glue.
That glue is not neutral. Memes and shitposts are more effective at signaling than at persuasion in the traditional sense. They are short, emotionally loaded, and designed to be quickly processed. Their currency is resonance rather than evidence. This quality makes them highly effective for movements that want to mobilize supporters fast and maintain cohesion through shared mockery of enemies.
There is also an industrial logic at play. Some actors do not merely shitpost for fun. They coordinate, replicate tropes, and engineer hashtags. These campaigns are cheap to run and, because they prioritize emotional reaction, can outcompete careful argument in the attention economy. Studies of political meme ecosystems find that memes are strategically deployed to shape narratives and make ideas stick without ever passing through a process of logical persuasion.
Why right wing actors are especially keen
Shitposting is not exclusively a right wing tool. The same tactics are visible on the left and in subcultural corners. But there are structural and psychological reasons why it has become a favourite among certain right wing movements.
First is a long standing anti-elite posture. Right wing populism often frames experts and institutions as corrupt or disconnected elites. Mockery, irony, and derision are perfect tools to delegitimize this supposed elite. If you can make the mainstream media or scholarly discourse look pompous or out of touch with a single viral mock post, you reduce the authority those institutions can wield. That helps to entrench narratives that rely less on evidence and more on distrust. Research on political meme warfare documents this explicit strategy.
Second, identity politics and grievance are fertile soil for shitposts. A simple image that ridicules a perceived enemy can simultaneously validate the audience’s sense of injustice and strengthen group identity. The content does not need to be persuasive across the whole population. It primarily needs to work inside the echo chamber and to be shareable outwardly. This weak form of persuasion turns out to be very efficient at galvanizing bases and sustaining outrage cycles.
Third, and perhaps most important, is the cover of humour. When a post is framed as a joke it becomes harder to regulate, harder to sanction, and easier to dismiss if challenged. That plausible deniability is powerful. A content creator can seed a toxic stereotype, then pretend it was an ironic joke if pushback arrives. This tactic blurs the line between satire and propaganda, and that blurring is politically useful.
Finally, platforms themselves encourage it. Algorithms reward engagement and emotional reactivity. Content that triggers anger or laughter is more likely to be shown to more people. Right wing actors have noticed this and built infrastructure around it: coordinated meme accounts, marketing groups that specialize in viral culture, and savvy creators who know how to fold political messaging into easily spreadable formats. The effect is a steady stream of low cost, high reach communication that can shift the feel of public discourse without ever engaging in serious policy debate.
The consequences for public life
What happens when a significant portion of political conversation migrates from argument to derision? Several things, all of them worrying for a functioning public sphere.
First, trust erodes. When mockery is the dominant form of engagement, institutions appear less credible and facts become negotiable. If everything is a performance and every source can be satirized into meaninglessness, the common ground on which democratic deliberation rests starts to crumble.
Second, the ladder of escalation is short. Once mockery is normalized, it is easy to escalate to cruelty. The early, absurd jokes make it easier to introduce more extreme themes because audiences have been desensitized. This is the path from harmless in-joke to normalized hatred, and case studies in modern extremist movements have shown that memes and shitposting can be early grooming tools.
Third, the politics of spectacle crowds out the politics of problem solving. If attention goes to viral mockery rather than policy detail, incentives for politicians change. Performative gestures, spectacle, and the ability to keep the outrage cycle alive become a form of political capital that can substitute for governance. The effect is less incentive to craft durable solutions and more incentive to keep the base energized through spectacle.
A final consequence is the legitimization of bad faith. When parody and sarcasm become indistinguishable from sincere claims in the public mind, accountability becomes more difficult. Those who traffic in bad faith can repeatedly deflect responsibility by claiming irony while continuing to benefit from the impact of their claims.
What can be done
Shitposting is not simply a nuisance we can legislate away. It is woven into the technical incentives of platforms, into human psychology, and into cultural habits around humour. But there are practical responses that can blunt the most corrosive effects.
The first is media literacy that goes beyond source checking. People need to learn to read jokes as argument forms and to ask what the joke is doing politically. Is it attempting to delegitimize an institution? Is it normalizing a stereotype? Teaching readers to spot the function of content as well as its factuality makes them less likely to be manipulated by a viral image.
The second is a careful approach to regulation and platform design. Platforms can redesign engagement models so that speed and outrage are not the primary drivers of reach. That does not mean censoring satire. It means prioritizing signals that measure credibility and context. Labeling and context tools can help readers see when a piece of content draws from a coordinated campaign rather than organic humour.
The third response is political counterplay that refuses to mirror the tactics of bad faith actors. Opposition groups can use satire and irony, but if they adopt the same lowest common denominator strategies they risk degrading the public sphere themselves. A better path is to combine sharp critique with factual clarity and to use humour strategically rather than reflexively.
Finally, scholars and journalists must continue to map these ecosystems and to publish clear, accessible accounts of how meme culture affects political attitudes. That evidence base is vital for designing interventions and for informing a public debate about norms.
Simply Put
Part of the appeal of shitposting is that it feels like an antidote to the performative solemnity of modern life. There is a genuine hunger for irreverence and for a culture that refuses to be policed by facts. Satire has always had a place in democratic life. But when satire becomes indistinguishable from bad faith manipulation, the liberating potential of humour turns toxic.
Shitposting is a symptom of a broader crisis in how we communicate in plural societies. It exposes the fragility of public reason when platforms reward emotional quickness and when identity trumps expertise. The stakes are not merely aesthetic. They are political and psychological: they concern how communities form, how trust is built and broken, and how a society decides what counts as truth.
If you run a social feed that blends analysis with irreverence, this article should not lead you to side with either censor or nihilist. Instead, treat the form as a lens. Use satire to illuminate power, but do not mistake mockery for argument. Keep the teeth, but make sure they bite at structures of authority rather than at the civic tissue that holds public life together.
Sources
Troll story: The dark tetrad and online trolling revisited with a glance at humor - PMC
The Central Role of Memes on Alt-Right Radicalisation in the “Chanosphere” — The Security Distillery
Memes, a political weapon | UOC
How the Far-Right Uses Memes in Online Warfare – GNET
Why does sadism troll? The role of negative emotional reactions from others - ScienceDirect
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