Policing's ‘meme strategy’: understanding the rise of police social media engagement work

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 2017, the New South Wales Police Force in Australia embarked on a bold new social media strategy, harnessing humorous Internet memes and cute images of police animals to increase ‘user engagement’ with their posts. Provoked by changes to Facebook's News Feed Algorithm, this self-described ‘meme-strategy’ generated a surge of new followers for the organisation’s social media accounts, with NSW Police's Facebook page reaching one million followers in August 2017 – a record for an official police Facebook page. This article examines the social media logics underpinning NSW Police's ‘meme strategy’ and similar police PR strategies that have employed humour and cute content to increase social media engagement. Through analysing the content and ‘active’ engagement metrics of NSW Police's ‘meme strategy’, in this article I critically examine this approach to police public relations, focusing in particular on its weaponisation of cute content to generate engagement. NSW Police's meme strategy, I argue, exemplifies what we might term social media ‘engagement work’: strategies intended to increase the reach of police messaging on social media and promote horizontal engagement spillover and vertical legitimacy spillover.