Enhancing public engagement and awareness: An analysis of internet meme posts usage by Indian police departments on Instagram

Abstract

Social media has become integral to individuals' everyday routines, with messaging applications and platforms serving as the predominant online destinations globally. These platforms have played a significant role in increasing the prominence of internet memes, which serve as vehicles for disseminating information through the utilization of comedy and sarcasm. In this study, we examine how Instagram posts by Mumbai, Delhi, Assam, Rajasthan, and Uttarakhand police about road safety, cybercrime, women's safety, and consent engage with the public, raise awareness about these issues, and improve police-public relations. We collected 100 static memes from the Instagram pages of the police departments between January 1, 2022, and February 28, 2023, and conducted a synthesis of metadata related to these internet memes to assess their likes and comments as a secondary source of information. In addition, we used exportcomments.com to export comments from posts to.csv files and Azure Machine Learning (AML) web services to assess the sentiments (positive, neutral, or negative) of the comments. As primary data, a questionnaire survey with 90 participants (ages ranging from 23 to 43 years, 34% male and 66% female) was conducted to analyze the potential impact of internet memes on social awareness, their informativeness, and the level of trust associated with the information they convey. Purposive random sampling was employed for the selection of the respondents. A bivariate Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) was calculated to determine the strength and direction of the linear relationship between social awareness, informativeness, and the level of trust in conveyed information. The results showed that the internet memes in the corpus received over 2 million likes and were liked an average of 3369 times. The sentiment analysis of the 692 comments reveals that of them, 90.50% (629) were favorable or positive, 5.61% (39) were neutral, and 3.88% (27) were negative. This shows that people's perceptions of and interactions with the police department on Instagram are generally positive due to the platform's wide reach, high level of involvement in the form of likes, and the dearth of comments expressing dissatisfaction. The bivariate correlation (r (88) =.79, p <.001) between these two factors (social awareness and informativeness) was positive and high. There is a significant association between the potential to alter public awareness and the level of informative substance transmitted by internet memes. The study concludes that the strategic use of internet memes by Indian police departments on Instagram significantly enhances public awareness, engagement, and positive perceptions regarding road safety, cybercrime, women's safety, and consent issues. In addition, Internet memes have the potential to be a beneficial and novel tool for social awareness issues, addressing social and public concerns across social media platforms.