Brazilians look to memes to cope with grim times

Rosa Sulleiro -

Political corruption, economic crisis, rampant crime — the headlines in Brazil are grim, so locals have taken to online memes that often go viral to relieve the stress.

A flurry of memes — funny images or video coupled with text —making light of the country’s bleak situation have taken the internet by storm in a country that has the world’s second largest number of Facebook users. One popular meme has tourists taking pictures next to a leaning Tower of Pisa with the face of the deeply unpopular president Michel Temer on it.

Another has Tite, the coach of the national football team, being proclaimed president.

Sandro Sanfelice, a 28-year-old who works for a phone company in the southern city of Curitiba, has 1.3 million followers on his specialty Facebook page Capinaremos. He claims some of his memes have reached five million users.

To keep up with the fast pace of news in Brazil, Sanfelice last year created ‘Capina Meme Factory’, a closed Facebook page that gathers meme producers.

Any member can propose a meme, and if it meets the group’s ethical standards and seems funny, one of the group’s 10 volunteer moderators will publish it.

One of the group’s biggest nights was on May 17, when the media group O Globo published a recording of Temer supposedly discussing a hush money payment to a jailed politician.

Soon pictures satirising Temer in every way possible — as well as pictures of his political nemeses, former leftist presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, laughing uproariously — spread online like wildfire.

Not everyone was amused, apparently.

A few days later the meme creators received an email from the presidency “telling us that the official pictures of Temer could not be used for any purpose other than journalism,” Sanfelice said.

That wrist-slapping gave them pause, but the humourists decided nevertheless to continue publishing memes featuring Temer.

The president’s office later sent an email stating that the message was a reminder that they needed prior authorisation to use official images for commercial purposes.

For Viktor Chagas, a professor at the Universidad Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, the message was clear.

“Politicians are not accustomed to losing control over their image. With the internet it’s increasingly easy for this to happen, and that worries them,” said Chagas, a specialist on the news media. — AFP