harvard essay meme

'Crying Northwestern Kid' turned his viral fan moment into a successful Harvard admissions essay. He says the experience taught him about empathy.

• You probably know John Phillips as "Crying Northwestern kid."
• The viral moment that made him famous 6 years ago taught him some great lessons he shared with Insider.
• Phillips even wrote about becoming a meme in a college admissions essay that helped get him into Harvard.

John Phillips was becoming a meme.

Six years ago, Phillips was watching No. 8 Northwestern take on No. 1 Gonzaga in March Madness. Phillips' dad was the athletic director at Northwestern, and Phillips had been close with the team, which had brought its magical run within a few good minutes of reaching the Sweet 16 for the first time in school history.

After an iffy call that went against the Wildcats, cameras caught Phillips, then just in middle school, reacting .

Emotions run high during March Madness, both for the players on the court, and the fans watching in the stands and at home.

"Northwestern crying kid.gif" was born.

—Jeff (@jamfan40) March 18, 2017

Phillips has since turned his moment of viral fame into a positive

As is true of any reaction meme, Phillips is more than Northwestern Crying Kid.

Now a freshman at Harvard, Phillips spoke with Insider just after an Economics class. He's planning on a double-major in Economics and Government, with an eye on a pre-law track, though as a freshman, the path is still unveiling itself in front of him.

Phillips had long thought he would attend Northwestern as a student, but he decided to apply to Harvard at the suggestion of his mother and a guidance counselor.

"Northwestern was home for forever, basically. Almost as long as I could remember," Phillips said. "But during the college process I wanted to look everywhere and see what different opportunities were out there."

While Northwestern and Duke were both high on his list, once he got into Harvard, he couldn't say no.

"I just wanted to challenge myself, to kind of push myself to gain new experiences, to put myself out of my comfort zone," Phillips said. "As much as I love, love, love Northwestern, I felt like if I'm ever going to put myself out there and challenge myself, get outta my comfort zone, college seems like a pretty good chance to do that."

In a way, Phillips' moment of meme-dom helped him reach the Ivy League, as it was the subject of his college admissions essay. His mom began joking about using the moment as college essay fodder while he was still in middle school, he recalled.

"Then once we got into to junior year, senior year, we'd go to these workshops," Phillips said. "And they were like, 'Try to think of kind of a unique experience, something that kind of demonstrates who you are.'"

Yep, he had one of those.

In his essay, Phillips described how his viral 15 minutes of fame, and the attention that it brought him in the days, months, and years to come, helped make clear the nature of empathy, and the value it holds.

Social media can be a cruel place, and commenters were quick to pile on Phillips' emotional reaction to the Wildcats' loss.

"People online and in-person routed me with false stories and negative comments: I was spoiled, I was over-emotional, I was a sore loser ," Phillips wrote. "Not a single person who criticized me knew my backstory or my heart."

What a meme can't tell the viewer was that Phillips was wildly close with this Northwestern team . He wasn't just some kid in a jersey. As son of Northwestern's athletic director, Phillips had spent real time with this team, shared meals with them. 

"I was passionate because this team was family to me," Phillips wrote. "But the internet didn't know this when they spread my crying reactions everywhere."

For Phillips, that moment was a life lesson laid out in full. Others didn't know his story, just as it's impossible to know anyone's full story.

"When we seek to understand others first, we guard ourselves against quick judgments and false stereotypes," Phillips wrote.

—Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) March 15, 2023

John Phillips was becoming a meme. Again.

Things were a bit calmer this second time around, though.

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His father, Jim Phillips, is now the commissioner of the ACC, and he was attending March Madness once again in that capacity. His son was by his side once again, sans braces and now swapping out his Northwestern jersey for a tidy blazer.

The internet made the connection, and suddenly, Phillips was in the spotlight once again.

"I'm not on Instagram or really social media at all, so people were sending me these things and I was like, Oh my gosh, it's happening again," Phillips said with a laugh. "It was really unexpected, but just kind of a fun thing."

On campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his status as Northwestern Crying Kid doesn't come up often, but Phillips doesn't shy away from it when it does.

"It's not something that I generally bring up," Phillips said. "Not because I'm embarrassed or scared or ashamed or anything like that. I think it's a pretty cool thing. It's just not something that I'm usually bringing up."

When sharing a fun fact about himself, as sometimes comes up as a college freshman, Phillips opts to talk about his family.

"I have four siblings. My dad is the youngest of 10, my mom's the youngest of seven," Phillips says. "So I have countless aunts, uncles, and cousins. I'm more proud of that."

Phillips' family proved a support system in the immediate aftermath of his original viral moment

During the game back in 2017, Phillips had been locked into the action on the court, but once the final whistle blew, he realized his phone was getting bombarded with messages as he and his family waited to greet the team.

"We were just sitting in the arena, and I had I don't know how many texts from my friends and family," Phillips said. "I was sitting with my siblings, and we were all just kind of scrolling and it was just appearing more and more and more."

Many of Phillips' friends and family that knew him initially told him to stay offline, but he was eventually able to embrace his newfound fame, even as a middle schooler.

"They were trying to be protective," Phillips said. "I know my mom and my family especially wanted to make sure that I was doing okay — they didn't want this to be a negative factor.

"Once things settled down from the initial shock of the moment, we were able to see okay, this doesn't have to be a negative thing," he said. "This can be a positive thing, and I could really embrace it.

"I'm really grateful to my friends and my family. Without my family, I wouldn't have been able to handle things or gain this kind of perspective. I credit my Catholic faith as well, [playing] a big role in that. I don't know what my perspective be would be without those."

While he doesn't advertise it at school, sometimes his memefied alter-ego becomes public knowledge. When fellow students ask about what he wrote about in his college essay, he tells his story. Sometimes the meme is coincidentally used in a public setting where he is present, making for a fun moment.

Phillips now has years of practice when it comes to making the best of his elevation into a character on the internet. In 2019, Pizza Hut used Phillips' now iconic image in an ad campaign tied to March Madness, with Phillips donating the money to charity.

Phillips is mostly off of social media for now, though it's not a direct result of his image being an online mainstay.

"As I've grown older, I wanted more time and more head space to focus on the things that I know I really care about," he said.

He doesn't use his own meme often, but there are moments when it comes in handy. When a friend was recently going through a tough time, suffering from a moment of their own embarrassment, Phillips texted him the image.

"I was like, 'Hey, if you're ever embarrassed, this is me as a seventh grader. Don't worry,'" he said.

"It ended up being a funny moment. We could unite around that thing and rally around it."

—Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) March 16, 2023

Phillips is not alone in having his emotional reaction to March Madness become a widely used meme. In 2015, Villanova's crying piccolo player  Roxanne Chalifoux quickly became shorthand for persevering through tough times, and just this past year, Utah State cheerleader Ashlyn Whimpey went viral  as she reacted to her final game cheering courtside.

I joked that Phillips could start up a support group for basketball fans whose emotions brought them viral fame.

"Maybe we need to start that up," he said. "Anything happens, just to reach out to me. We'll get through it together."

Phillips has solid, practical advice as someone who had lived through an unexpected viral storm

"The biggest one is just to try and embrace it and enjoy it," Phillips said. "No matter what happens, no matter what moment you're caught in, just to try to be you. Try not to run away from that fact and just say, 'Hey, this is me.' Use that as more of a positive than a negative. That was definitely the best thing that my family and friends allowed me to do, and I couldn't imagine the situation not having done that.

"The second piece of advice, and it's a really big one, is enjoy it, but don't read any of the comments," Phillips said with a laugh.

"There's gonna be hundreds, thousands of comments and those aren't the people that know you, and love you, and know who you are. Rely on the people close to you, because those are the people that have been with you through it and will know you through all the rest of it."

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Harvard Rejection Letter

Rumor: photograph depicts an admissions rejection letter sent by harvard college., david mikkelson, published march 5, 2015.

Claim:   Photograph depicts an admissions rejection letter sent by Harvard College.

Examples:   [Collected via Twitter, March 2015]

After trying to get into Harvard this woman was hit with one of the finest rejection letters we have seen!  

CLASSIC. #harvarduniversity sure knows how to write great rejection letters!  

Just realized the person who got that rejection letter from Harvard was a girl

Origins:   On 4 March 2015, a purported Harvard student admissions rejection letter was circulated via social media sites, including the following tweet which achieved heavy circulation:

Got denied from Harvard :( pic.twitter.com/VigHYU6plN — hunter (@hawntr) March 4, 2015

The image captivated social media users despite its implausibility, and many wondered if the recipient (one "Molly McGaan") had indeed been taken to task by Harvard admissions for submitting an inappropriate application:

After careful consideration of your application, I am sorry to inform you that we are unable to offer you a place in the class of 2019. This year's application pool was the strongest in the College's history, and we are unable to offer admission to every student, regardless of their proficiency in "dank memes", or their level of "$wagg moneyyyy." Although your GPA and ACT scores were certainly up to our standards, your essays raised some eyebrows at the admissions meetings. For future reference, it is not wise to start an essay with the words, "listen here u little slanks" and end with "McGaan out *drops mic*" We also didn't need a copy of your mixtape, regardless how "fire" it is (one admissions counselor actually listened to it, and we are pretty sure 40 minutes of you making animal noises is not "fire"). In addition, we will be returning your copy of Grownups 2 signed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, because you said it's your "greatest possession" and we don't want it. We also suggest obtaining recommendation letters from teachers or trusted mentors, not "my #4 side ho Derek" or Chief Keef, who submitted a picture of a dinosaur drawn in crayon on a rolling paper.

The photograph was initially published on 3 March 2015 to the Facebook page of Citizen Poke , a student-led comedy magazine. Later that day Molly McGaan, the letter's creator, posted a status update and clarified that the letter was a joke:

Guys- I have literally gotten 12 messages asking me this, so I thought I clear it up. That Harvard letter I shared is not real. It's from the comedy magazine I write at my school.

McGaan subsequently reiterated her authorship and the nature of the Harvard rejection letter on a subreddit devoted to questioning shaky Internet claims.

Last updated:   5 March 2015

By David Mikkelson

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

Article Tags

Fake Harvard rejection letter causes real-life stress for student Molly McGaan

Chicago teen worries that joke letter could affect her actual application.

Social Sharing

A joke rejection letter from Harvard University has been shared thousands of times online and its author is wondering if it could affect her actual application to the Ivy League school. 

The fake letter informs Molly McGaan of Chicago that Harvard is unable to accept her application, despite her claims of proficiency in "dank memes," her killer essay salutation ("listen here u little slanks"), and her inclusion of a "fire" mixtape. 

Got denied from Harvard :( <a href="http://t.co/VigHYU6plN">pic.twitter.com/VigHYU6plN</a> &mdash; @hawntr

The letter was apparently posted to Facebook yesterday and spread to Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter via several different accounts. Between the multiple posts and retweets, the letter has been posted tens of thousands of times. 

However, the author of the letter, Molly McGaan herself, wasn't the one who put it online. And now she's freaking out a little bit. 

OKAY BUT I ACTUALLY APPLIED TO HARVARD WHAT IF THEY SEE THIS AND GET MAD AT ME &mdash; @mollymcgaan

This is really scary omg &mdash; @mollymcgaan

McGaan said she wrote the letter for a high school publication.  

Guys! THE LETTER IS FAKE! I wrote it for my school humor magazine called citizen poke! &mdash; @mollymcgaan

McGaan told the Boston Globe that the letter was posted on the  Facebook page for her high school's satirical magazine and spread from there. 

"People legitimately think it's real, which is so bizarre to me. It's just so insane," she told the Globe.

The letter, apparently on Harvard letterhead but with the magazine's logo visible at the top, says that the application pool for the class of 2019 was the strongest ever, and admission could not be offered to every applicant, regardless of their level of "$wagg moneyyyy." 

It also advises against ending one's application essay with "*drops mic*." 

Recommendation letters, the fake Harvard dean of admissions wrote, must be more robust than "a picture of a dinosaur drawn in crayon on a rolling paper." 

McGaan said the inspiration for the letter was her rejection from the University of Michigan.

"I wanted to turn something sad into something funny," McGaan said in her interview with the Globe.

She has also applied to Harvard, but has yet to receive an actual response. 

The Globe contacted Harvard about the fake letter.  School officials said they have seen it, but had no further comment.

You can't tell me what to do anymore mom I'm viral now, get on my level. &mdash; @mollymcgaan

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Harvard’s Ugly Offshoot of Campus Meme Culture

By Eren Orbey

One of the most active communities to have emerged from my first two years as an undergraduate is not a registered student organization but a public Facebook group, “Yale Memes for Special Snowflake Teens.” Formed last November “to comfort Yalies’ crushed dreams” after an election that left much of the campus in despair, the forum is a gathering place where students share lighthearted graphics—trendy political GIF s, modified Trump sound bites, and Photoshopped stock images with captions that, like the cheeky group name, skewer stereotypes about a college that has been rocked, in recent history, by more controversies than I can name . The group originated in New Haven but its membership has since grown to numbers larger than Yale’s total enrollment, with virtual confrères joining from peer schools that host their own equivalent forums: “UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens,” “Princeton Memes for Preppy AF Teens,” “ Harvard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens .”

Within the politically correct confines of liberal-arts colleges, these online threads have allowed students to flirt with humor that might scandalize broader swaths of campus. At one point this spring, a slew of posts in Yale’s group used stills from Internet pornography to express sarcastic enthusiasm about the university’s endowment. The very title of another group—“Cornell Memes for Sad Teens,” which has since been renamed—may, to some, have seemed to trivialize that university’s suicide rate. But most campus meme groups take measures to discourage overly provocative postings: visuals must relate to university life, and bands of student moderators are tasked with deleting irrelevant content. Though the forums would surely seem juvenile and smug—and even occasionally offensive—to outsiders, they tend to rouse little attention beyond their immediate sphere of undergraduates.

One exception came in April, when Harvard University discovered a stash of particularly tasteless memes in a private Facebook group started by recently admitted students. According to the Harvard Crimson , which first reported this controversy last week, at least ten of the prospective freshmen involved in posting the material have had their acceptances to Harvard revoked. The guilty Facebook group chat, at one point entitled “Harvard Memes for Horny Bourgeois Teens,” was formed in December as an offshoot of a more inclusive thread meant for recent admits, and it seemed to pride itself on provocation. Aspiring members were instructed to submit risqué content to the larger group in order to be vetted for the more exclusive collective, which shared images that mocked pedophilia, child abuse, sexual assault, and the Holocaust. One meme, according to the Crimson , compared the corpse of a Mexican child to a piñata.

The decision to rescind these students’ offers based on their private correspondences has, unsurprisingly, alarmed some advocates of free speech, who fear that Harvard’s punishment has threatened the First Amendment rights of the former admits rather than simply held them accountable. Others have pointed out that the university has chosen to be more lenient in disciplining already matriculated students. Last year, Harvard’s undergraduate dean denounced offensive messages posted in an unofficial group chat for the Class of 2020, but he did not take disciplinary action against its members. The university does, though, continue to post a broad warning at the top of official Facebook pages for admitted students: “As a reminder,” it reads, “Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions,” among them the discovery of any student’s participation in “behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character.”

A Yale-themed meme posted on social media.

Incoming college freshmen have long feared surveillance by admissions officers, who, some imagine, may use the Internet to scrutinize potential admits. Such suspicions, substantiated or not, have inspired many applicants to attempt to avoid detection by partaking in a new rite of passage , changing their Facebook names to alternative spellings or clumsy puns. (My very tame, very turgid social-media persona once made a brief showing as “Aar Istotle.”) These days, though, the threat of snooping grownups feels somewhat outmoded. Precisely how Harvard representatives unearthed the memes is unclear—the university has maintained a cagey diplomacy around the case—but it seems likely that the offshoot group’s informant was not, in fact, an undercover inspector but a onetime student member who stumbled upon the offensive content, deemed it unacceptable, and then alerted the admissions office.

The images that issued from Harvard’s offshoot group have certainly offended many members of the virtual undergraduate populace, among them students who believe, or at least preach, that jokes should never broach certain topics at all. More narrowly, though, the images were condemned for violating an unspoken code of campus meme culture, which, for all its levity, aspires to the same inclusivity that liberal-arts campuses have strived, and sometimes struggled, to achieve. “Yale Memes for Special Snowflake Teens” is open to anyone who wants to join, its humor crowdsourced through a consistent, capricious economy of “likes” that unites even the most disparate cliques. Popular posts, propelled by comments, rocket to the top of the page, and tend to include gripes about the most relatable subjects: grades and dating. Other images, be they weirdly niche or inexplicably unfunny, falter and are forgotten in a long chronology. This egalitarian spirit insures that a post’s content reflects on its creator—not the other way around. I’ve seen the quietest students ascend to online celebrity after Photoshopping the face of our university’s president onto some keen TV screen-cap, and fiery outsiders redeemed by memes that celebrate our campus’s most benign mascot, the bulldog.

The offending pre-frosh, uninitiated in the mores of college life, virtual or otherwise, erred by importing the sort of aggressive one-upmanship that thrives in many other corners of the Internet—on 4chan, for instance, where anonymous users are free to post their “dankest,” darkest memes without consequence. The students failed to grasp that college groups are not meant to mimic online culture at large but, instead, to do something trickier, regulating its visual language to insure that it remains friendly to all. The offshoot thread’s ultimate offense was its perverse privacy, which tried to warp a public pleasure into a restrictive, hateful privilege. But the vile behavior is perhaps less surprising than the fact that these groups have managed to operate mostly without incident for as long as they have.

Last week, Yale’s meme group paused to debate the same question that students at Harvard were considering: Was the university’s decisive disciplinary action justified? Several prospective Harvard students who enjoyed the public meme thread but avoided its darker counterpart told the Crimson that they supported the decision. “I do not know how those offensive images could be defended,” one said. A flurry of insouciant memes, posted to the main thread, made light of the students’ fate. (“If the meme is too dank, you’ll walk the plank,” read one riff on “Pirates of the Caribbean.”)* *{: .s3}Most responses among Yale students were similarly unpitying. After a member of our group posted the Crimson’s coverage with a warning to “stay safe,” presumably from politically correct overseers, one rising junior suggested that users should refrain from posting offensive messages not out of fear of discipline but out of moral conviction. “Common meme sense?” she wrote. “How about just common human decency?” Never mind those adult monitors. It was the students who were watching.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, how to write the perfect harvard essay: 3 expert tips.

College Info , College Essays

Aiming for the world-renowned Harvard University? As part of the application to this prestigious Ivy League school, you'll be required to submit responses to five short answer questions.  

This is actually a big change! In years past, Harvard offered an optional supplemental essay opportunity that applicants could write to add extra flair to their application. This year, Harvard has opted to require responses to five short answer prompts and completely omitted the optional, supplemental Harvard essay prompt. 

But what should you write about for your Harvard essay short answers? What are the different Harvard essay prompts to choose from, and how should you answer them so you can give yourself your best shot at getting in?

In this guide, we give you advice for each Harvard essay prompt as well as tips on how to decide what to write. But before we look at the prompts, let's go over what Harvard actually requires in terms of essays.

Feature Image: Gregor Smith /Flickr

What Essays Do You Need to Submit to Harvard?

Those applying for admission to Harvard must submit an application through either the Common Application or the Coalition Application . For your Harvard application, you'll need to write a personal essay in response to one of the prompts provided by the Common App or Coalition App (depending on the system you're applying through).

This essay is required for all applicants and should typically be about 500-550 words long (and must be less than 650 words). To learn more about this essay, check out the current prompts for the Common App and Coalition App on their official websites.

In addition to this required essay, Harvard first-year applicants are required to submit 250 word (max) responses to five short answer questions . 

Here are the prompts for the five required 2023-2024 Harvard short answer questions :

Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?

Briefly describe an intellectual experience that was important to you.

Briefly describe any of your extracurricular activities, employment experience, travel, or family responsibilities that have shaped who you are.

• How do you hope to use your Harvard education in the future?
• Top 3 things your roommates might like to know about you.

Now, you might be wondering: is Harvard offering an optional supplemental essay opportunity as part of this year’s application process? No. This year, Harvard is not accepting optional supplemental essays as part of the first-year admissions process . The optional supplemental essay has been offered in previous years, but not for the 2023-2024 admissions cycle. 

Now, here’s where things get a little tricky. The five short answer questions listed above are part of what’s called the Harvard first-year application supplement. But they aren’t the same thing as the supplemental essay from years past! And the important thing to remember is this: these short answer questions–and the entire Harvard supplement–are not optional. You’ll have to answer all five questions if you want to be considered as a candidate for admission!

The good news is that each short answer topic is very open ended, and they give you plenty of room to express who you are and how and why you’re the perfect fit for Harvard!

How to Write the Harvard Short Answers: Every Prompt Analyzed

In this section, we go through the five required Harvard supplement essay prompts and offer you tips on how to write effective, powerful short answers…in 200 words or less!

Prompt 1: Diversity

This first Harvard essay prompt is all about what you can bring to campus that will positively contribute to student diversity. Though we tend to think of race/ethnicity when using the word "diversity," you can actually interpret this word in a number of ways.

As a large and prestigious institution, Harvard strongly values students who have different and unique backgrounds and experiences, so it's important for them to admit students who embody these values as well.

This prompt is essentially a version of the diversity essay, which we talk about in more detail in our guide.

Here are some key types of diversity you can discuss (note that this is not an exhaustive list!):

• Your ethnicity or race
• A unique interest, passion, hobby, or skill you have
• Your family or socioeconomic background
• Your religion
• Your cultural group
• Your sex or gender/gender identity
• Your opinions or values
• Your sexual orientation

Tips for Answering This Prompt

• Choose a personal characteristic that's had a large impact on your identity. Don't talk about your family's religion if it's had little or no impact on how you see and define yourself. Instead, concentrate on the most significant experiences or skills in your life. If you play the theremin every day and have a passion for music because of it, this would be a great skill to write about in your essay.
• Be clear about how your unique characteristic has affected your life and growth. You don't just want to introduce the experience/skill and leave it at that. How has it molded you into the person you are today? How has it influenced your ambitions and goals? 
• Be sure to tie this characteristic back to the diversity at Harvard. Basically, how will your experience/skill/trait positively influence the Harvard student body? For example, if you come from a specific cultural group, how do you believe this will positively impact other students?

Prompt 2: Important Intellectual Experience

With this prompt, Harvard wants you to focus on an intellectual or learning experience that's had a big impact on you in terms of your personal growth, your academic/intellectual interests and passions, the field of study you want to pursue, etc.

This intellectual experience could be anything that's intellectually stimulating, such as an essay or book you read, a poem you analyzed, or a research project you conducted.

Note that this experience does not need to be limited to something you did for school —if you've done anything in your spare time or for an extracurricular activity that you think fits this prompt, feel free to write about that.

For example, you could write about how you found an old copy of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species at a garage sale, and how reading this prompted you to develop an interest in biology, which you now intend to major in and eventually make a career out of.

This is also an ideal prompt to highlight a particular interest or passion you have that differs from the academic field you want to study in college.

For instance, perhaps you're applying for admission as a computer science major, but you're also a huge fan of poetry and often take part in local poetry readings. Writing about a poem you recently read and analyzed could illuminate to the admissions committees a different, less prominent side of your personality and intellectual interests , ultimately showing that you're open minded and invested in gaining both new skills and experiences.

• Choose an experience that had a significant impact on you . Don't talk about how reading Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade made you realize how much you enjoyed writing plays if you were already writing plays way before then! Pinpoint an intellectual experience that was meaningful to you, and write about it honestly.
• Be specific about the intellectual experience you had and clearly relate it back to your strengths and interests . In other words, what kind of impact did this experience have on you? Your academic goals? Your future plans? For example, instead of writing about how a scientific paper on climate change made you think more deeply about the environment, you could talk about how this paper prompted you to form a recycling program at your school, take a class on marine biology, and so forth.

Prompt 3: Non-Academic Defining Experiences

This prompt is asking you to discuss experiences you've had that involved traveling, living, learning, and/or working in some capacity outside of the formal classroom. Most importantly, you’ll need to explain what kind of effect that experience has had on you.

Here are examples of experiences you could talk about for this essay:

• Any extracurricular activity you engage in, particularly a spike approach, if you’ve got one (learn more about creating your spike approach in our complete guide !)
• Living or traveling abroad
• Moving to a new place or living in multiple places
• Working a part-time job
• Working a temporary job or internship somewhere outside your own community
• Helping with finances, caregiving, or maintaining a family business (like a farm or lawn care business, for example)
• Choose a truly significant experience to talk about. Although your experience doesn't need to be life-changing, it should have had a noteworthy impact on you and who you've become. If, for example, you traveled to Mexico with your family but didn't really enjoy or learn much from the trip, it's better to avoid writing about this experience.
• Make sure to talk about how this travel/living/work experience has affected you. For example, say you spent a couple of summers in high school visiting relatives in South Africa. You could write about how these trips helped you develop a stronger sense of independence and self-sufficiency—traits which have made you more assertive, especially when it comes to leading group projects and giving speeches.
• Don't be afraid to get creative with this essay. For instance, if you lived in a country where you at first didn't understand the local language, you could open your Harvard essay with an anecdote, such as a conversation you overheard or a funny miscommunication.

Prompt 4: Harvard and Your Future

This Harvard essay prompt is pretty self-explanatory: it wants you to discuss how you intend to use your education at Harvard after you graduate—so in a future job or career, in grad school, in a particular research field, etc.

Basically, how will your college education help you achieve your future goals (whatever those may be)?

If you’re still undecided about the field(a) you want to study at Harvard, don’t panic! It’s okay to think outside the box for this prompt. 

Maybe you don’t know what you want to major in yet, but you do know that you share Harvard’s values and want to bring those values to the world after you graduate. Whether you’ll do that by joining the Peace Corps or heading back to your hometown to volunteer for a few months before starting your career, just be specific about how Harvard is the right school to put you on the path to your future! 

• Be careful when talking about your future goals. You don't want to come off too idealistic, but you also don't want to sound too broad or you'll come across unfocused and ambivalent. Try to strike a balance in how you discuss your future dreams so that they're both attainable and specific.
• Clearly connect your goals back to your current self and what you've accomplished up until this point. You want to make it clear that your goals are actually attainable, specifically with a Harvard education. If you say you hope to start your own interior design business after graduation but are planning to major in biology, you're only going to confuse the admissions committee!
• Emphasize any ways Harvard specifically will help you attain your academic goals. For example, is there a club you hope to join that could connect you with other students? Or is there a particular professor you want to work with? Don't just throw in names of clubs and people but specifically explain how these resources will help you reach your goals. In short, show Harvard that what they can offer you is exactly what you need to succeed.

Prompt 5: Your Future Goals

How you hope to use your college education

This Harvard essay prompt is pretty self-explanatory: it wants you to discuss how you intend to use your education at Harvard after you graduate —so in a future job or career, in grad school, in a particular research field, etc.

Should You Choose This Prompt?

If you have a pretty clear vision for your future goals during and after college, this is a perfect prompt to choose for your Harvard essay.

If, on the other hand, you're still undecided about the field(s) you want to study or how you intend to use your major, you might want to choose a different prompt that's less focused on your future and more concentrated on how past events and experiences have shaped you as a person.

Prompt 6: List of Books

A list of books you have read during the past twelve months

Of all Harvard essay prompts, this one is by far the most unique.

Here, you're asked to simply list the books you've read in the past year. This essay is more than just a list, though—it's a brief overview of where your intellectual interests lie. These books may include works of fiction or nonfiction, essays, collections of poetry, etc.

Have you read a lot of diverse and interesting books in the past year? Are you an avid reader who loves dissecting books and essays? Do you enjoy a creative approach to college essays? If you answered yes to these questions, then this prompt is a perfect fit for you.

Even if you haven't read a ton of books this past year, if you were especially intrigued by some or all of what you did read, you could certainly use this prompt for your essay.

• Instead of just listing the titles of books you've read, you might want to include a short sentence or two commenting on your reaction to the book, your analysis of it, why you enjoyed or didn't enjoy it, etc., after each title. Be sure to vary up your comments so that you're highlighting different aspects of your personality. Also, don't just regurgitate analyses you've read online or that your teacher has said—try to come up with your own thoughts and interpretations.
• Don't feel the need to stick to only the most "impressive" books you read. The Harvard admissions committee wants to see your personality, not that of a pretentious applicant who claims to have only read Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway. Be honest: if you read Twilight in a day, why not make a short joke about how addictive it was?
• Go beyond a chronological list of books. It'll be far more interesting if you list the books you read in a more unique way. For example, you could organize titles by theme or in the order of how much you enjoyed them.

Prompt 7: Honesty

The Harvard College Honor code declares that we "hold honesty as the foundation of our community." As you consider entering this community that is committed to honesty, please reflect on a time when you or someone you observed had to make a choice about whether to act with integrity and honesty.

As you can see with this quotation, Harvard strongly values honesty and integrity. Therefore, if you go with this prompt, you're essentially telling Harvard that you, too, embody a powerful sense of morality and honesty.

• Was there a specific time in your life when you had to make a difficult choice to be honest about something with someone?
• Could this incident be considered morally ambiguous? In other words, was the "right thing to do" somewhat of a gray area?
• If you didn't make the "right" choice at the time, how did you come to terms with or learn from this decision? What were the consequences, and what did this experience teach you about your own morals and how you value honesty?
• Be wary of the topic you choose to write about. Don't discuss a situation in which you did something obviously unethical or, worse, illegal. These types of situations are very black and white and therefore don't pose much of a moral dilemma. Additionally, talking about such an experience might make you seem dishonest and immoral, which you absolutely do not want Harvard to think about you!
• Try to find a topic that isn't black and white. Choosing "gray" incidents will help emphasize why the choice was so difficult for you and also why it's affected you in this way. For example, say your friend calls you crying right before you have to leave to take the SAT. Do you skip the test to comfort your friend, or do you hang up and leave? This kind of situation does not have an evident "right" answer, making it an ideal one to use for this essay.
• You could also discuss a time when you did not make the "right" choice—and what you learned from that mistake. As long as you look closely at why you made the "wrong" choice and what this incident taught you about integrity, your essay will be interesting and relevant.

Prompt 8: Citizens and Citizen-Leaders

The mission of Harvard College is to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society. What would you do to contribute to the lives of your classmates in advancing this mission?

This prompt might sound a little vague, but all it wants to know is how you'll have a positive impact on both your classmates and on other people after graduation. Put simply, what kind of leader/citizen will you be at Harvard? After you graduate from college and enter the real world?

This prompt is similar to Prompt 5 in that it wants to know what kind of person you'll become after you leave college and how you'll positively influence society.

If you're a natural-born leader and have had at least a few significant experiences with leading or facilitating things such as club activities, field trips, volunteer efforts, and so on, then this Harvard essay prompt would be a great fit for you.

• Focus on a time when you led others and it resulted in a positive outcome. For instance, you could write about your position as team captain on your school's soccer team and how you would gather your teammates before each game to offer words of encouragement and advice on how to improve. You could then describe how your team began to perform better in games due to clearer communication and a stronger sense of sportsmanship. Make sure to answer the critical question: how did you lead and what ultimately made your leadership style successful?
• Discuss what kind of role your leadership skills will have at both Harvard and after you graduate. The prompt is asking about your classmates, so you must specifically address how your leadership skills will contribute to the lives of your peers. How will your past experiences with leading help you approach group projects, for example? Or clubs you join?
• Make sure to mention how you'll be a good citizen, too. By "citizen," Harvard essentially means a productive member of both the school and society in general. Basically, how have you contributed to the betterment of society? This is a good place to talk about experiences in which you played a crucial supporting role; for instance, maybe you helped out with a local volunteer initiative to feed the homeless, or maybe you joined a community project to build a new park in your town.

Prompt 9: Taking Time Off

Each year a substantial number of students admitted to Harvard defer their admission for one year or take time off during college. If you decided in the future to choose either option, what would you like to do?

Here, you're being asked what you plan to do with your time if you decide to defer your admission to Harvard or take time off during college. For example, will you travel the world? Work a full-time job? Do an internship? Take care of a sick relative?

Obviously, Harvard doesn't want to read that all you're going to do is relax and play video games all day, so make sure to think carefully about what your actual plans are and, more importantly, how these plans will benefit you as a person and as a student.

Only choose this Harvard essay prompt if you're pretty certain you'll be taking time off from college at some point (either before or during) and you have a relatively concrete idea of what you want to do during that time.

• Be specific and honest about your plans. While many students like to take time off to travel the world, you don't just want to write, "I plan to backpack Europe and learn about cultures." Think critically about your desires: why do you want to do this and how will this experience help you grow as a person? Don't just reiterate what you think Harvard wants to hear—be transparent about why you feel you need this time off from school to accomplish this goal.
• Be clear about why you must do this at this particular time. In other words, why do you think this (i.e., before or during college) is the right time to do whatever it is you plan to do? Is it something you can (or must) do at this exact time, such as a one-time internship that won't be offered again?

Prompt 10: Diversity

Harvard has long recognized the importance of student body diversity of all kinds. We welcome you to write about distinctive aspects of your background, personal development or the intellectual interests you might bring to your Harvard classmates.

This final Harvard essay prompt is all about what you can bring to campus that will positively contribute to student diversity. Though we tend to think of race/ethnicity when using the word "diversity," you can actually interpret this word in a number of ways.

This prompt is essentially a version of the diversity essay , which we talk about in more detail in our guide.

The main question to ask yourself before choosing this prompt is this: do you have a unique background or interest you can write about?

If any of these topics stand out to you and you can easily come up with a specific characteristic or experience to discuss for your essay, then this is a solid prompt to consider answering.

• Be clear about how your unique characteristic has affected your life and growth. You don't just want to introduce the experience/skill and leave it at that. How has it molded you into the person you are today? How has it influenced your ambitions and goals?

A Real Harvard Essay Example

Our resident full SAT / ACT scorer and co-founder of PrepScholar, Allen Cheng , applied to, got into, and attended Harvard—and he's posted his own Harvard supplement essay for you to look at. You can read all about Allen's essay in his analysis of his successful Harvard application .

Allen describes his essay as "probably neutral to [his Harvard] application, not a strong net positive or net negative," so it's important to note that this Harvard essay example is not representative of exactly what you should do in your own Harvard supplement essay. Rather, we're showing it to you to give you a taste of how you could approach the Harvard essay and to demonstrate the kinds of simple mistakes you should avoid.

Writing a Memorable Harvard Essay: 3 Tips

To wrap up, here are three tips to keep in mind as you write your Harvard supplement essay.

#1: Use an Authentic Voice

Having a clear, unique, and authentic voice is the key to making yourself stand apart from other applicants in your Harvard application—and to ensuring you're leaving a long-lasting impression on the admissions committee.

Therefore, write your essay in the way that comes most naturally to you, and talk about the things that actually matter to you. For example, if you love puns, throwing one or two puns into your essay will emphasize your goofier, non-academic side.

Using your voice here is important because it humanizes your application. The essay is the only chance you get to show the admissions committee who you are and what you actually sound like, so don't pretend to be someone you're not!

The only thing to look out for is using too much slang or sounding too casual. In the end, this is still a college essay, so you don't want to come off sounding rude, disrespectful, or immature.

In addition, don't exaggerate any experiences or emotions. The Harvard admissions committee is pretty good at their job—they read thousands of applications each year!—so they'll definitely be able to tell if you're making a bigger deal out of something than you should be. Skip the hyperbole and stick to what you know.

Ultimately, your goal should be to strike a balance so that you're being true to yourself while also showcasing your intelligence and talents.

#2: Get Creative

Harvard is one of the most difficult schools to get into (it only has about a 4% acceptance rate! ), so you'll need to make sure your essay is really, really attention-grabbing. In short, get creative with it!

As you write your personal essay, recall the classic saying: show, don't tell. This means that you should rely more on description and imagery than on explanation.

For example, instead of writing, "I became more confident after participating in the debate club," you might write, "The next time I went onstage for a debate, my shoulders didn't shake as much; my lips didn't quiver; and my heart only beat 100 times instead of 120 times per minute."

Remember that your essay is a story about yourself, so make sure it's interesting to read and will ultimately be memorable to your readers.

#3: Edit and Proofread a Lot

My final tip is to polish your essay by editing and proofreading it a lot. This means you should look it over not once, not twice, but several times.

Here's the trick to editing it: once you've got a rough draft of your essay finished, put it away for a few days or a week or two. Don't look at it all during this time —you want to give yourself some distance so that you can look at your essay later with a fresh perspective.

After you've waited, read over your essay again, noting any mistakes in spelling, grammar, and/or punctuation. Take care to also note any awkward wording, unclear areas, or irrelevant ideas. Ask yourself: is there anything you should add? Delete? Expand?

Once you've done this step several times and have a (nearly) final draft ready to turn in, give your essay to someone you can trust, such as a teacher, parent, or mentor. Have them look it over and offer feedback on tone, voice, theme, style, etc. In addition, make sure that they check for any glaring grammatical or technical errors.

Once all of this is done, you'll have a well-written, polished Harvard essay ready to go— one that'll hopefully get you accepted!

What's Next?

If you've got questions about other parts of the Harvard application, check out our top guide to learn what you'll need to submit to get into the prestigious Ivy League school .

How tough is it to get into Harvard? To other selective universities ? For answers, read our expert guide on how to get into Harvard and the Ivy League , written by an actual Harvard alum!

What's the average SAT score of admitted Harvard applicants? The average ACT score? The average GPA? Learn all this and more by visiting our Harvard admissions requirements page .

Hannah received her MA in Japanese Studies from the University of Michigan and holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California. From 2013 to 2015, she taught English in Japan via the JET Program. She is passionate about education, writing, and travel.

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Harvard University Essay Example

Harvard University is a highly-selective school, so it’s important to write strong essays to help your application stand out. In this post, we’ll share an essay a real student has submitted to Harvard. (Names and identifying information have been changed, but all other details are preserved).

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Read our Harvard essay breakdown to get a comprehensive overview of this year’s supplemental prompts.

Prompt: Travel, living, or working experiences in your own or other communities

A scream in the night.

In the town of Montagu, South Africa, the sun had set hours ago, leaving its place to a deep dark sky. Everything was peaceful and quiet. In a little lodge, a family of four people had just finished eating on a dimly lit terrace. The heat was so intense even the black silence seemed to suffocate – only a few crickets dared to break its density. The mother asked something to her daughter, who stood up, and bypassed the table. That’s when she screamed. An intense, long scream, that reverberated in the little town of Montagu.

How do I know that? It was me. 

Me, miserable as I had fallen down the terrace… into a plantation of cacti! I couldn’t move. I felt as if each cactus thorn contained poison that spread through my back, my arms, my entire body. The plants were engulfing me into the darkness. I was suffocating, trying to grasp some of the hot, heavy air. Until I felt her hand. My mom’s. 

She and my father organized this trip to South Africa. Valuing experiences more than material wealth, they liked to organize trips to foreign, far away countries. In addition to South Africa, I visited Cuba, Nepal and China. Four countries where landscapes and cities are dissimilar to France’s. Four countries that allowed me to discover numerous communities, recipes and traditions. Four countries where I met animals, plants and humans I had never seen before.

I am a city girl. As a little girl, I was never really fond of flora or fauna. However, during my trips, I was lucky to see animals in freedom and to interact with nature. A baboon broke into my car in South Africa and walked all over me – literally. I held an iguana in Cuba, did a safari in South Africa and talked with a parrot in Nepal. I saw the sun rising on the Machapuchare. I ultimately understood that all I had experienced was thanks to Nature. I realized its preciousness and its urgency to be saved. I gained proximity to the environment that I had always lacked. My blood turned green thanks to travels. 

In addition to animal discoveries, travels are encounter engines. From little to aged humans, from all genders, from everywhere, travels allowed me to meet incredible people. The uncanny apparition of a mysterious little girl particularly touched me in Ghorepani, Nepal. I had walked for seven hours that day, and was waiting for dinner, sitting on a bench. She slowly advanced towards me.

“What’s your name?” I asked the white figure in the obscurity.

The little girl stopped moving. Dark curly hair, dark deep eyes, white clothes covered in mud among the deep dark night. Our eyes locked in each other’s, the sound of our breathing floating in the dense silence, everything seemed to be suspended. After what felt like dozens of hours, she looked at me and silently walked away, a star in the ink black sky. 

Every person encountered made me grow. Some like the Nepalese little girl simply disrupted me, some opened my eyes on poverty, others opened my eyes on racism. Every person I met had a story to share, a fact to transmit. I visited an orphanage in a township in South Africa. The teacher, a frail and tiny woman, explained that racism was still so profound in the country that black and mixed race people were fighting to death in the neighbourhood. Centuries of abuse towards people of color, for children to pay the price, growing up parentless in the orphanage. The sound of the rain was echoing on the metal houses as the children sang their anthem. Wet furrows appeared as raindrops were racing on every cheek:

‘Let us live and strive for freedom,

In South Africa our land.’

Traveling is ultimately a chance. It is an opportunity to understand the complexity of the world by getting close to it. Traveling allowed me to realize the differences between each country and region. But beyond those dissimilarities, I saw singing, dancing and laughing everywhere in the world. Being away brought me closer to my home and my family and friends, my newspaper team, every community I’m involved in. Traveling represents a learning process. I integrated leadership and diligence in Nepal, watching children and old men transport wood on their back. Speaking foreign languages allowed me to acquire experience and put my theoretical skills to practise. I acquired a lot of adaptability through travels as part of their greatness comes from its unpredictability. Traveling truly enriches the intellect of those who have the chance to do it.

What the Essay Did Well

This is overall a delightful, very readable essay. The author starts with a dramatic hook to capture the reader’s attention, and they build on that initial story with vivid imagery like “ I felt as if each cactus thorn contained poison that spread through my back, my arms, my entire body.” In general, the language is strong throughout the entire essay. Other beautiful gems include, “The sound of the rain was echoing on the metal houses as the children sang their anthem” and, “The uncanny apparition of a mysterious little girl particularly touched me.” The author has a way with words, and they proudly demonstrate it in their response. 

In addition to strong imagery, the author also does a satisfactory job at answering the prompt. The open-ended question not only means that students could answer in a variety of ways, but also that it might be easy to fall into a trap of answering in an unrelated or uninteresting manner. The author here does a good job of directly answering the prompt by providing clear examples of their travels around the world. Their response also goes beyond merely listing experiences; rather, they tell stories and describe some of the notable people they have met along the way. By telling stories and adopting a whimsical tone that evokes the wanderlust of travel, they elevate the impact of their response. 

We also learn a fair amount about the author through their stories and personal reflections. We see that they are concerned about social justice through their retelling of the interactions in South Africa. We see them reflecting on the universal joys of singing and dancing: “ But beyond those dissimilarities, I saw singing, dancing and laughing everywhere in the world.” In the closing paragraph, we learn that they are adaptable and willing to undergo lifelong learning. Thus, another reason this essay shines is because it not only tells us what travels/experiences the author has engaged in, but it provides deeper introspection regarding how they have grown from these experiences.

What Could Be Improved

While the essay is beautiful, and the fast-moving pace matches the feeling of seeing unfamiliar places for the first time, the narrative runs the risk of being too wide-ranging. The introductory story of falling onto a bed of cacti could warrant an entire essay unto itself, yet the author does not return to it anywhere else in their response. They missed an opportunity to bring the response full circle by ruminating on that once more in their conclusion. 

Another thing to be careful of is how the privilege inherent in international travel might cause the author to see the life through a certain lens. Although they remark upon how their family prioritizes experiences over material wealth, the fact is that extensive international travel relies on having material wealth to pay for costs like airfare and housing. It is important to demonstrate humility and awareness of privilege when responding to college essay prompts, and this is no exception. 

Where to Get Your Harvard University Essays Edited

Do you want feedback on your Harvard University  essays? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

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Harvard was right to crack down on racist memes. But Facebook should’ve done it first.

I used to post memes on the message boards of the early internet. Things have gotten much worse.

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Share All sharing options for: Harvard was right to crack down on racist memes. But Facebook should’ve done it first.

At least 10 would-be Harvard students had their admission revoked because they shared offensive memes on Facebook. The memes used jokes about racial slurs, sexual assault, and child abuse, and when they were discovered by administrators, Harvard rescinded their admissions offers.

I’ve been posting on internet forums since I was a preteen. It’s easy to look at Harvard’s punishment as being too harsh on a bunch of kids sharing things online, but there is more to this story than just kids sharing memes.

Harvard represents for these kids the first real-world consequence of posting content that is racist, sexist, and violent. When this kind of behavior is left unchecked, it can lead to bad places — harassment, normalizing offensive language, and radicalization.

It also highlights the fact that today’s internet is sorely missing content moderation, something prioritized by the message boards where memes got their start. Compared to today’s social media, the admins of early forums like Something Awful drew much clearer lines in the sand to shut down offensive posts. But for Facebook and Twitter today, the techno-libertarian ethos of free speech has allowed hateful content to flourish.

That means for some posters, it ends up falling to outside institutions like Harvard to step in to stop this behavior.

Why proper moderation is key to stopping hate speech online

On the internet, the attitude of sharing hateful content and dismissing it as “just memes” is pervasive. Racist and sexist memes fill the same space that racist and sexist jokes do. After all, a meme is just a joke in image format. And just like someone telling a hateful joke and freeing up space for these attitudes, these memes make offensive things seem normal.

Once you’ve normalized all kinds of vile speech, it becomes easy to make the jump to full-on hate speech and white nationalism. This is how the alt-right got a foothold in 4chan, and this is the way some people end up on the other side. When nobody’s there to tell you it’s wrong and when the entirety of your life comes through online interaction, the only people who can steer you are the ones you talk to online .

This is why it is absolutely crucial for social media to properly moderate what goes on between users. If you didn’t grow up knowing the differences between these kinds of proto-social media, it becomes easy to get tricked into thinking it’s a free speech issue. In reality, it’s about keeping hate speech from quietly taking root. Otherwise you’ll see more situations like Harvard, where an external entity gets a glimpse in and is shocked by just how far it has gone.

I grew up posting on forums. I understand this kind of culture.

My personal story is instructive here: While I never participated in the darkest corners of the web, the culture where racist and violent memes are shared is familiar to me. Richard Spencer, the alt-right leader famous for being punched in the face, said , “The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year-old tech-savvy guy working in IT.” Alt-right affiliation aside, this describes me to a T. The difference is, I ended up a Bernie Sanders-supporting, Chapo Trap House-listening urbanite. I've always wondered what put me on that path. I think it has a lot to do with the culture of the places I posted online — and, more importantly, the places I avoided.

I started posting online in the pre-social media days. Back in the early 2000s when I was a preteen, I violated the 13-year-old age restriction to post on message boards. It was different back then. You would join a forum that would align with your interests, which usually centered on pretty dorky topics like video games or Dragon Ball Z , and would slowly migrate to off-topic forums to goof off about anything else.

You would build this online personality for yourself through jokes, images, and arguing in debates. It was early enough that nobody knew what a meme was — they were just funny pictures that you’d save in a folder on your computer and post elsewhere.

There was a hierarchy to those boards — you’d have an administrator that would run higher-level things, and then moderators who would handle the day-to-day of making sure people posting didn’t violate the rules of the forum. Those moderators made sure the pot didn’t boil over into vile things, because the internet has always been an awful place.

There was one of these forums, a place called Something Awful, that became kind of a beacon for all of these other message boards. Two things set Something Awful apart — the quality of the content (I can say with certainty that you’ve laughed at memes from Something Awful, where LOLcats and Slender Man found their start), and the fact that in order to post, you had to pay $10.

It was an excellent community that was maintained by a large number of moderators of varied backgrounds that had the ability to back up the rules about quality of content with a cost of $10 to re-register if you got banned. This meant that if the moderation team wanted to crack down on content, they could. It also meant that posters had to keep things relatively civil.

This also led to too restrictive of an environment for some posters, and one day a young man who posted on a subforum called Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse under the name “moot” decided to create a new forum modeled off a Japanese site called 2chan, free form these moderating forces. He named his new site 4chan.

I was always afraid of 4chan. Even before 4chan was known for sprouting Anonymous , the morally dubious group of politically active hackers, and for the rise of the alt-right, 4chan was a place where you could go and be instantly greeted with something unspeakably offensive. It got its start as an anime forum, but quickly grew into a thicket of misogyny and racism, fed by a laissez-faire moderation approach where anything that wasn’t explicitly illegal was allowed. Anonymity and a snarling user base full of bullying, threats of violence, and encouragement of self-harm were the norm. If Something Awful was a governed online city-state, 4chan users were the barbarians at the gates.

What happened with the teens at Harvard happened on Facebook, but its roots are in 4chan. I forget what it’s like to be a teenager sometimes, but thinking about this case made me go back and remember just how much of being a teenage boy is pushing the envelope to feel rebellious. It’s how you push those boundaries to see when they give, and being online gives you the ability to push them very, very far.

The problem becomes that the internet can be an echo chamber. You curate whom you follow based off your tastes, and that can give the false impression that everything you’re doing is perfectly fine, even as you swim out into darker and more dangerous waters. You keep pushing to be edgier, and everyone else seems to be encouraging you. That’s the rabid groupthink that keeps 4chan going.

Today’s social media moderators simply aren’t as effective

The problem is that social media enables it. Something Awful was capable of some truly incredible moments of delusional groupthink, but the moderation always stopped the hordes of anonymous posters calling for someone to kill themselves that 4chan invited on a nightly basis.

But places like Facebook and Twitter come out of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley and believe that freedom is paramount. This creates a moderation environment that is far more reminiscent of 4chan than Something Awful. I’ve experienced Twitter’s terrible moderation policy. I’m not Jewish, but I’ve had anti-Semitic slurs and pictures thrown at me on Twitter, and Twitter has done nothing about them after I’ve reported the posts. I’ve reported my fair share of what I consider to be hate speech on Facebook, and have never had a post removed. You can try this on your own — Facebook will tell you if they don’t find it in violation of their community guidelines.

All sorts of vile things are lurking on Facebook, and the teens who were denied admission to Harvard are proof of that. When there are no consequences, and everyone is telling you that this is okay by not stepping in, I understand the environment that made these Harvard kids think they weren’t doing anything wrong.

Facebook’s guidelines for what to moderate leaked online , and the guidelines are more permissive than any other forum I have posted on in my life: Anything they do not deem as a credible threat of violence is allowed, which creates a tremendous amount of leeway for content to flourish that an outside observer would deem inappropriate. Based on the standards that Twitter has revealed through whom it censures and whom it lets go free, it’s easy to imagine that platform’s standards are similar.

I would assume that if a prospective student were caught posting (Content warning: violence) “To snap a bitch’s neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat,” Harvard would reconsider their admission, but that quote appears verbatim as an example of a non-credible threat in the leak of Facebook’s standards and that is perfectly acceptable for their platform. That gap between what Silicon Valley’s free speech paradigm sets up as acceptable and what society at large considers to be okay is at the crux of what allowed these kids to think they could get away with sharing these images with their peers.

The internet is a wild and largely untamed place, and despite all of its advantages and its full integration into our day-to-day lives, there’s still a lot of darkness luring around the edges. Proper moderation keeps this darkness from encroaching further, and it’s effective — it just has to have teeth. It’s a lot easier to have a moderator take down a post and learn from why they did than it is to explain why you aren’t going to Harvard anymore.

Cooper Lund is an IT s ystems a dministrator currently living and posting in Brooklyn. You can find him on Twitter @cooperlund .

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Harvard University Essay Examples (And Why They Worked)

The following essay examples were written by several different authors who were admitted to Harvard University and are intended to provide examples of successful Harvard University application essays. All names have been redacted for anonymity. Please note that Bullseye Admissions has shared these essays with admissions officers at Harvard University in order to deter potential plagiarism.

For more help with your Harvard supplemental essays, check out our 2020-2021 Harvard University Essay Guide ! For more guidance on personal essays and the college application process in general, sign up for a monthly plan to work with an admissions coach 1-on-1.

Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences. (50-150 words)

Feet moving, eyes up, every shot back, chants the silent mantra in my head. The ball becomes a beacon of neon green as I dart forward and backward, shuffling from corner to far corner of the court, determined not to let a single point escape me. With bated breath, I swing my racquet upwards and outwards and it catches the ball just in time to propel it, spinning, over the net. My heart soars as my grinning teammates cheer from the sidelines.

While I greatly value the endurance, tenacity, and persistence that I have developed while playing tennis throughout the last four years, I will always most cherish the bonds that I have created and maintained each year with my team.

Why this Harvard essay worked: From an ex-admissions officer

When responding to short essays or supplements, it can be difficult to know which info to include or omit. In this essay, the writer wastes no time and immediately captivates the reader. Not only are the descriptions vivid and compelling, but the second portion highlights what the writer gained from this activity. As an admissions officer, I learned about the student’s level of commitment, leadership abilities, resiliency, ability to cooperate with others, and writing abilities in 150 words.

I founded Teen Court at [High School Name Redacted] with my older brother in 2016. Teen Court is a unique collaboration with the Los Angeles Superior Court and Probation Department, trying real first-time juvenile offenders from all over Los Angeles in a courtroom setting with teen jurors. Teen Court’s foundational principle is restorative justice: we seek to rehabilitate at-risk minors rather than simply punish them. My work provides my peers the opportunity to learn about the justice system. I put in over fifty hours just as Secretary logging court attendance, and now as President, I mentor Teen Court attendees. My goal is to improve their empathy and courage in public speaking, and to expand their world view. People routinely tell me their experience with Teen Court has inspired them to explore law, and I know the effort I devoted bringing this club to [High School Name Redacted] was well worth it.

This writer discussed a passion project with a long-lasting impact. As admissions officers, we realize that post-secondary education will likely change the trajectory of your life. We hope that your education will also inspire you to change the trajectory of someone else’s life as well. This writer developed an organization that will have far-reaching impacts for both the juvenile offenders and the attendees. They saw the need for this service and initiated a program to improve their community. College Admissions Quiz: If you’re planning on applying to Harvard, you’ll want to be as prepared as possible. Take our quiz below to put your college admissions knowledge to the test!

Harvard University Supplemental Essay Option: Books Read During the Last Twelve Months

Reading Frankenstein in ninth grade changed my relationship to classic literature. In Frankenstein , I found characters and issues that resonate in a modern context, and I began to explore the literary canon outside of the classroom. During tenth grade, I picked up Jane Eyre and fell in love with the novel’s non-traditional heroine whose agency and cleverness far surpassed anything that I would have imagined coming from the 19th century. I have read the books listed below in the past year.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus *
• Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger *
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt ♰
• Mongo Beti, Mission Terminée * (in French)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening
• Arthur Conan-Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
• Kamel Daoud, Meursault, contre-enquête * (in French)
• Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry *
• Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane *
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying *
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• E. M. Forster, Maurice
• E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
• E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread
• Eliza Haywood, The City Jilt ♰
• Homer, The Iliad
• Christopher Isherwood, All The Conspirators
• Christopher Isherwood, A Meeting by the River
• Christopher Isherwood, Sally Bowles
• Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
• Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies *
• Morrissey, Autobiography
• Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy *
• Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
• Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Herland
• Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
• Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove
• Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
• Mary Renault, The Friendly Young Ladies
• Mary Renault, The King Must Die
• Mary Renault, The Persian Boy
• J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes * (in French)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet *
• Mary Shelley, The Last Man
• Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead *
• Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
• Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
• Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
• Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
• Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction ♰
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman ♰
• Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House and Other Stories
• * indicates assigned reading
• ♰ indicates independent study reading

Harvard University Supplemental Essay Option: What would you want your future college roommate to know about you? (No word limit)

Hi Roomie!!!!

You probably have noticed that I put four exclamation points. Yes, I am that excited to meet you, roomie!

Also, I don’t believe in the Rule of Three. It’s completely unfair that three is always the most commonly used number. Am I biased in my feelings because four is my favorite number? Perhaps. However, you have to admit that our reason for the Rule of Three is kinda arbitrary. The Rule of Three states that a trio of events is more effective and satisfying than any other numbers. Still, the human psyche is easily manipulated through socially constructed perceptions such as beauty standards and gender roles. Is having three of everything actually influential or is it only influential because society says so? Hmm, it’s interesting to think about it, isn’t it?

But if you’re an avid follower of the Rule of three, don’t worry, I won’t judge. In fact, if there’s one thing I can promise you I will never do, it’s being judgmental. Life is too short to go around judging people. Besides, judgments are always based on socially constructed beliefs. With so many backgrounds present on campus, it really would be unfair if we start going around judging people based on our own limited beliefs. My personal philosophy is “Mind your own business and let people be,” So, if you have a quirk that you’re worrying is too “weird” and are afraid your roommate might be too judgy, rest assured, I won’t be.

In fact, thanks to my non-judginess, I am an excellent listener. If you ever need to rant with someone about stressful classes, harsh gradings, or the new ridiculous plot twists of your favorite TV show (*cough* Riverdale), I am always available.

Now, I know what you are thinking. A non-judgmental and open-minded roommate? This sounds too good to be true. This girl’s probably a secret villain waiting to hear all my deepest and darkest secrets and blackmail me with them!

Well, I promise you. I am not a secret villain. I am just someone who knows how important it is to be listened to and understood.

I grew up under the communist regime of Vietnam, where freedom of speech and thought was heavily suppressed. Since childhood, I was taught to keep my opinion to myself, especially if it is contradictory to the government’s. No matter how strongly I felt about an issue, I could never voice my true opinion nor do anything about it. Or else, my family and I would face oppression from the Vietnamese government.

After immigrating to America, I have made it my mission to fight for human rights and justice. Back in Vietnam, I have let fear keep me from doing the right thing. Now, in the land of freedom, I won’t use that excuse anymore. I can finally be myself and fight for what I believe in. However, I can still remember how suffocating it was to keep my beliefs bottled up and to be silenced. Trust me, a conversation may not seem much, but it can do wonders. So, if you ever need a listener, know that I am right here.

See, I just shared with you a deep secret of mine. What secret villain would do that?

See ya soon!!!!!

[Name redacted] : )

P/S: I really love writing postscripts. So, I hope you won’t find it weird when I always end my emails, letters, and even texts with a P/S. Bye for real this time!!!!!

Harvard University Supplemental Essay Option: Unusual circumstances in your life

I would like the Harvard Admissions Committee to know that my life circumstances are far from typical. I was born at twenty-four weeks gestation, which eighteen years ago was on the cusp of viability. Even if I was born today, under those same circumstances, my prospects for leading a normal life would be grim. Eighteen years ago, those odds were worse, and I was given a less than 5% chance of survival without suffering major cognitive and physical deficits.

The first six months of my life were spent in a large neonatal ICU in Canada. I spent most of that time in an incubator, kept breathing by a ventilator. When I was finally discharged home, it was with a feeding tube and oxygen, and it would be several more months before I was able to survive without the extra tubes connected to me. At the age of two, I was still unable to walk. I engaged in every conventional and non-conventional therapy available to me, including physical and speech therapy, massage therapy, gymnastics, and several nutritional plans, to try to remedy this. Slowly, I began to make progress in what would be a long and arduous journey towards recovery.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of repeated, often unsuccessful attempts to grip a large-diameter crayon since I was unable to hold a regular pencil. I would attempt to scrawl out letters on a page to form words, fueled by either determination or outright stubbornness, persevering until I improved. I spent countless hours trying to control my gait, eventually learning to walk normally and proving the doctors wrong about their diagnoses. I also had to learn how to swallow without aspirating because the frequent intubations I had experienced as an infant left me with a uncoordinated swallow reflex. Perhaps most prominently, I remember becoming very winded as I tried to keep up with my elementary school peers on the playground and the frustration I experienced when I failed.

Little by little, my body’s tolerance for physical exertion grew, and my coordination improved. I enrolled in martial arts to learn how to keep my balance and to develop muscle coordination and an awareness of where my limbs were at any given time. I also became immersed in competition among my elementary school peers to determine which one of us could become the most accomplished on the recorder. For each piece of music played correctly, a “belt” was awarded in the form of a brightly colored piece of yarn tied around the bottom of our recorders- meant as symbols of our achievement. Despite the challenges I had in generating and controlling enough air, I practiced relentlessly, often going in before school or during my lunch hour to obtain the next increasingly difficult musical piece. By the time the competition concluded, I had broken the school record of how far an elementary school child could advance; in doing so, my love of instrumental music and my appreciation for the value of hard work and determination was born.

Throughout my middle and high school years, I have succeeded at the very highest level both academically and musically. I was even able to find a sport that I excelled at and would later be able to use as an avenue for helping others, volunteering as an assistant coach once I entered high school. I have mentored dozens of my high school peers in developing trumpet skills, teaching them how to control one’s breathing during musical phrases and how to develop effective fingering techniques in order to perform challenging passages. I believe that my positive attitude and hard work has allowed for not only my own success, but for the growth and success of my peers as well.

My scholastic and musical achievements, as well as my leadership abilities and potential to succeed at the highest level will hopefully be readily apparent to the committee when you review my application. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the behind-the-scenes character traits that have made these possible. I believe that I can conquer any challenge put in front of me. My past achievements provide testimony to my work ethic, aptitudes and grit, and are predictive of my future potential.

Thank you for your consideration.

In this essay, the writer highlighted their resilience. At some point, we will all endure challenges and struggles, but it is how we redeem ourselves that matters. This writer highlighted their initial struggles, their dedication and commitment, and the ways in which they’ve used those challenges as inspiration and motivation to persevere and also to encourage others to do the same.

Harvard University Supplemental Essay Option: An intellectual experience (course, project, book, discussion, paper, poetry, or research topic in engineering, mathematics, science or other modes of inquiry) that has meant the most to you.

I want to be a part of something amazing, and I believe I can. The first line of the chorus springs into my mind instantaneously as my fingers experiment with chords on the piano. In this moment, as I compose the protagonist’s solo number, I speak from my heart. I envision the stage and set, the actors, the orchestra, even the audience. Growing increasingly excited, I promptly begin to create recordings so I can release the music from the confines of my imagination and share it with any willing ears.

My brother [name redacted] and I are in the process of writing a full-length, two-act musical comprised of original scenes, songs, characters. I began creating the show not only because I love to write music and entertain my friends and family, but also with the hope that I might change the way my peers view society. Through Joan, the protagonist of my musical, I want to communicate how I feel about the world.

The story centers around Joan, a high schooler, and her connection to the pilot Amelia Earhart. Ever since I saw a theatrical rendition of Amelia Earhart’s life in fifth grade, she has fascinated me as an extraordinary feminist and a challenger of society’s beliefs and standards. As I began researching and writing for the show, I perused through biographies and clicked through countless youtube documentaries about the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, astounded by her bravery and ability to overcome a troubled childhood and achieve her dream. In my musical, as Amelia transcends 20th century norms, changing the way that people regard women and flight, Joan strives to convince her peers and superiors that the worth of one’s life spans not from material success and grades, but from self-love and passion.

As I compose, the essence of each character and the mood of each scene steer the flow of each song. To me, it seems as though everything falls into place at once – as I pluck a melody out of the air, the lyrics come to me naturally as if the two have been paired all along. As I listen to the newly born principal line, I hear the tremolo of strings underscoring and the blaring of a brass section that may someday audibly punctuate each musical phrase.

The project is certainly one of the most daunting tasks I’ve ever undertaken – we’ve been working on it for almost a year, and hope to be done by January – but, fueled by my passion for creating music and writing, it is also one of the most enjoyable. I dream that it may be performed one day and that it may influence society to appreciate the success that enthusiasm for one’s relationships and work can bring.

These essay examples were compiled by the advising team at Bullseye Admissions. If you want to get help writing your Harvard University application essays from Bullseye Admissions advisors , register with Bullseye today .

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What Harvard Business School Really Wants: How To Ace The HBS Essay

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The Harvard Business School MBA application includes a single, staggeringly general essay question: “As we review your application, what more would you like us to know as we consider your candidacy for the Harvard Business School MBA Program?”

For many applicants, this question is maddeningly wide-open. It’s so non-specific it can be paralyzing. And HBS offers a generous word limit of 900 words to tell your story. With that much space and so little to go on, candidates may find themselves wondering, “ Where do I begin? What do I share?”

 As a Fortuna Admissions coach and former Associate Director at HBS leading Ph.D. admissions and supporting the MBA Interview Board, I spend a lot of time putting this essay into context for anxious candidates. Everyone wants to know, what is HBS looking for?

Beyond credentials, HBS is looking for character. The Admissions Committee seeks principled, passionate individuals who have the potential to fulfill the HBS mission to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. While this aspect is readily understood, the process of how to convey this is far more complex.

Character is not quantifiable. It doesn’t show up on a resume, in your test scores, or through grades or your transcripts. Therefore, the essay is often the make-or break factor in your HBS application. It’s your opportunity to show them what you are made of and what drives you. The competition is fierce, so this is the place where you can convince them you have what it takes to be part of this incredible community.

Remember that the majority of applicants will come with strong credentials. Those credentials get you to the threshold, but they won’t get the interview, because Harvard has seen it all. Once you’ve reached a certain level of exceptionalism in terms of being brilliant, driven, and dedicated, it’s all about your story. Think of your essay as drafting a “movie trailer” for your life; it should be engaging, interesting, with a level of drama and a pace that keeps the story moving. A great essay will entice the reader to say wow, I cannot wait to meet this person and learn more.

Here are five key tips for writing a powerful HBS essay:

1. do not produce a highlight reel of professional achievements.

The biggest temptation — and the biggest snooze — is a “resume-to-prose” essay, in which you restate your accomplishments. Nothing will put your wearied admissions reader to sleep faster. And frankly, staying awake was the biggest challenge I faced when reading applications, from my time at INSEAD to HBS and even doing admissions work at Stanford. 

Too many applicants wrote essays that were boring, lifeless, and dull. What really made my eyes glaze over were narratives from candidates who sailed through life, having never failed or struggled, who always excelled at everything and then segued to the details of some deal or consulting project. 

This can’t be overstated: Your essay must not read simply as a story of successes and accomplishments . It’s a common pitfall, and it robs your story of the potential for making an emotional connection. Above all, write an essay you yourself would want to read.

So, when HBS asks you, “what else do you want us to know?” focus on the “what ELSE.”  You have already detailed your job experiences in the short answer section of the application along with your resume. Do not restate these same facts again, and again. Remember, they know what consultants and bankers do in the office, so unless you are introducing something new or connecting your work to a broader theme, avoid trying to “show off” by writing at length about work achievements. 

2. Be open, imperfect, and REAL

I find it disheartening that my strongest piece of advice, which is to tell the truth and be yourself, is also so difficult at times. Most people are afraid to be real, and they spend hours polishing and perfecting an image or “brand” that is an illusion. When you take the risk to be yourself, to be vulnerable, it inspires a human connection. It gives you credibility. What’s more interesting to read:  the story of someone who sailed through life and had everything work out perfectly, every single time? Or the story of someone who struggled, faced extraordinary challenges, and demonstrated the tenacity and resilience to not only survive but to thrive?

That’s why the more personal and open you can be in terms of why you do what you do, the more memorable and appealing you’ll be — because it’s so rare. Few people are rigorously honest, and fewer are vulnerable in the process of storytelling. 

Some of the best essays I have ever read open with the story of a failure and how that shaped them. From my perspective, if you are never making mistakes, you aren’t working hard enough. Besides, there is something so powerful about the truth when you read it — it hits you and tunes up your curiosity. And that’s what you want to inspire — enough enthusiasm and curiosity for the admissions committee to want to meet you and learn more. Always remember: this is a search for authenticity.

3. Show vs. tell

In the process of storytelling, the details are everything. Avoid the temptation to qualify your experience or tell the readers what they are supposed to think. Show them instead. For example, what is more powerful — someone saying, “I had a horrible flight,” or, “We pulled onto the runway, and I could see from my window the dark clouds above; the captain announced once cleared for takeoff, we were in for a bumpy ride. I could feel my pulse quickening.” 

While you want to avoid detailing a terrible flight experience for the HBS adcom, this concept is critical for effective storytelling. Show them what you have been through and the challenges you have faced through vivid recollection. A consultant can help you sift through your experience to help you identify what to focus on. Generally, experiences that shaped your values and attitude toward life are a great place to start. You might talk about a challenge, for example, or a time you fell and picked yourself back up. Underscore how it shaped you as a human being and what you learned from the experience and remember to SHOW them the impact vs. simply telling them.

4. Connect the dots

Your essay should have what I refer to as the “thread of continuity” that will serve as a unifying theme. Perhaps you can introduce an experience that was momentous or marked an important milestone in your opening paragraph. As you weave together stories that show the committee who you are and the twists and turns your life has taken, you will want to revisit this theme at different points in your story as a way to unify the narrative. The conclusion should serve to tie it all together. This may sound formulaic, but rest assured,  this is a tried-and-true model that allows you to connect the dots for your reader. Any great story or even speech — from Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream to the latest Hollywood blockbuster — has a cohesive flow and a pace that keeps the audience’s attention. There is always an intangible driving force that builds, which is an essential ingredient to a winning essay.

5. Respect the reader’s time

HBS previously gave no word count. Now they limit the essay to 900 words, or about two pages. As noted above, content is critical, details matter, and some stories need more space. One of the most powerful essays I have ever worked on with a client was one word under 2,000, and the feedback he received in the interview was that his essay was one of the best the committee had ever read, and his interviewer thanked him for his openness and honesty.

That said, a shorter word limit helps keep you focused. If you can showcase your unique facets succinctly in fewer words, that’s fine. Being pithy and succinct shows discipline and humility. It also shows that you recognize your audience and respect the busy application reader’s time.

Ultimately, HBS is looking for people who are ambitious and extraordinary, with a habit of leadership, a history of engaging the community, and the appetite and aptitude for success that separates them from the simply smart and hard working. Beyond a demonstrated professional track record and impressive credentials, they also want to see a proclivity for consistently exceeding goals. 

More than that, they’re seeking mission-driven doers who are motivated by a deeper purpose and poised to make the institution proud. Your challenge — and opportunity — with the essay is to fuse that with a captivating story of who you are as an individual. And if that feels daunting, keep in mind that no one else has lived your story but you, which makes you uniquely qualified to tell it.

For more tips on applying to Harvard Business School, view my short video strategy session , or read my related article on Acing the HBS Interview.

DON’T MISS: READ THREE ACTUAL HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL MBA ESSAYS

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Rioters wave flags on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File

Donald Trump, meme leader in chief

New book traces insurgent use of text, photos, media on internet to upend crucial institutions of democracy.

Excerpted from “Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America” by Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and Emily Dreyfuss, senior managing editor, and Brian Friedberg, senior researcher, both at Technology and Social Change Project, Shorenstein Center.

“We’re storming the Capitol! It’s a revolution!” Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee, told a reporter outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She had a blue Trump flag slung across her neck like a cape. As soon as she entered the Capitol, she tearfully related, police maced her in the face. As she cried into the camera, her fellow rioters walked into the frame carrying American flags, MAGA flags, Trump flags, and the familiar yellow flag with the coiled rattlesnake hissing the warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.”

As soon as this video of Elizabeth hit Twitter, it went viral. Her melodic, plaintive tone, her earnest insistence that she was part of a revolution, even her strange piano-design scarf and flag cape made her memorable. People watching the insurrection unfold live shared video of her with glee. Millions watched the chaos happen in real time — on broadcast TV, social media, and video streams that the rioters themselves dutifully posted. A very real and coordinated attempt to thwart the democratic process of America was also a surreal media spectacle, and Elizabeth was one of the minor characters.

From Twitter to TikTok, Elizabeth became fodder for internet jokes. People remixed the video with autotune. Sleuths spun conspiracies when they noticed that she held a towel with something white and round in it that she rubbed on her red eyes. Was it an onion? some speculated. Maybe Elizabeth was a liar who hadn’t really been maced, and perhaps the whole insurrection had been planned (it was, but not in the way these conspiracists meant) or was a hoax (it wasn’t).

Elizabeth from Knoxville had been memed. No longer a person with a real identity, now Elizabeth from Knoxville was a character, a memorable piece of media that resonated with people for different reasons. The video clip of her was recontextualized, remixed, and redistributed, carrying all sorts of meaning. That’s the definition of a meme, first coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 text “The Selfish Gene.” Supporters of the insurrection shared internet memes that focused on how Elizabeth had been treated badly by the police. People who thought the insurrection was a terrifying breach of democracy shared memes celebrating her macing or mocking her impotent rage. These memes made clear what group the sharer was in, which is a key aspect of memes. Memes signify membership in an in-group. Sometimes they are such an inside joke that they are inscrutable to people on the outside. Yet even when they are popular and accessible, they contain a point of view and announce the positioning of the sharer. Elizabeth, in the memes, was an ally or an enemy, depending on where you stood.

She herself was clearly a member of a meme group, as her flag made clear: the MAGA tribe. And it was memes like MAGA that helped bring Elizabeth to D.C. in the first place. Along with memes like “1776!,” which people had been sharing as hashtags and chanting at rallies to indicate that this January day in 2021 was, as Elizabeth had said, a revolution. And memes like the Gadsden flag, that coiled timber rattlesnake on a yellow background, itself one of the oldest memes in American history, born to express the spirit of insurgency. The Gadsden is now associated with the right, but its first iteration was created by Benjamin Franklin in 1754 as a call to unite the colonies during the French and Indian War. The snake, native to America and dignified in its approach to violence because it always warns its prey with a rattle first, was meant to embody the American spirit. It was during the Revolutionary War that the flag turned into the familiar image you see on Twitter profile pictures, bumper stickers, and lawn signs today, designed by a South Carolina politician named Christopher Gadsden (hence the name), and it has over two centuries been adopted by everyone from the Ku Klux Klan to libertarians to women’s rights activists. There’s a twisted irony that a symbol of resistance to tyranny was used in an insurrection against the democratic government it was created to help form. But it makes sense that this flag would become a symbol for a homegrown insurgency; one hallmark of a lasting meme is its ability to be recontextualized, co-opted, and used against its creators.

Amid the chaos of that day, flags told the story. Insurgents plunged the flagstaff of Old Glory into the building’s windows, piercing the glass, and with it the sense of security protecting the seat of government. Rioters paraded a Confederate flag solemnly through the halls, an act that hadn’t even happened during the Civil War. Outside, they held up green Kekistan flags, which most people had never seen, proudly claiming the U.S. Congress for the esoteric denizens of a meme-made country that sprang from the bowels of the internet. Plain red or blue flags with two words on them dotted the congregation: TRUMP NATION. And everywhere, the Gadsden, poised to attack.

The memes played a significant role in mobilizing these troops and inciting the violence. The central idea animating the insurrection — that President Donald Trump had been denied his rightful victory in the election — was itself a memetic slogan, #StopTheSteal, a phrase hashtagged, printed on T-shirts, and adopted by politicians and millions of voters. In three short words, #StopTheSteal managed to convey the complicated idea that Joe Biden was an illegitimate president and Trump had been wronged by a powerful system intent on subverting the will of the people, and it announced membership in the MAGA community. In the run-up to that day, memes were shared on Facebook, in chat rooms, and over encrypted messaging apps to drum up excitement and convince more people to head to D.C. In the charging documents from many of the people arrested for participating in Jan. 6, the FBI often included internet memes shared by the insurrectionists as proof of ideology. Posting a meme with the Trump quote “Stand back and stand by” indicated that someone was part of the Proud Boys militia, whereas someone sharing a green Pepe the Frog meme in a post about the insurrection was possibly in the alt-right, that subfaction of extremely online far-right youths who made themselves famous in the 2016 election by “memeing the president into office.”

These internet subcultures that had thrived in relative obscurity in the overlooked corners of the internet dramatically came into the light of day on Jan. 6. Everyone watching CNN at home — which had its highest rating day ever during the insurrection — was suddenly seeing groups of people together in real life who had found each other and formed a community of like-mindedness online. These communities had been having a profound impact on American society for decades — mainstreaming fringe ideas through the sharing of memes, trolling celebrities and journalists and politicians, and generally getting up to all sorts of planned mayhem — but were largely unknown to most Americans until they emerged from the wires of the internet and showed up on the Capitol steps that day.

They came because they were summoned. And the person summoning them was himself a living, breathing meme: President Donald Trump. He embodied insurgency with every aspect of his behavior. He had embraced these communities during his first run. He retweeted them with gusto despite the press calling him out for it. He refused to disavow them. He said they were very nice people. He embodied their grievances even as he actually belonged to the wealthy elite. His face was already a popular meme on their message boards. He spoke their language and treated them with respect. Trump told these far-right fringe factions over and over, in tweets and speeches, to come to the Capitol that day to “fight like hell.” It was a fight they had already been engaged in online, attacking Trump’s enemies, spreading his lies, amplifying conspiracies that would help him reach his goal, believing theories like QAnon that existed solely to make him look all-powerful. When their meme general asked them to bring that war to Washington, D.C., they took buses, drove caravans, chartered private jets, and showed up.

Never before had all these factions been assembled in real life together. The closest they had come were Trump rallies during his campaign and presidency, or perhaps the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which ended in a homicide, many arrests, and the destruction of the so-called alt-right coalition. The horde who breached the Capitol were not the alt-right, though some alt-righters were there, nor were they GOP supporters, though some of them were there too. They were not a homogeneous group of extremists but rather a collection of far-right and conspiratorial factions united by three things: extreme dissatisfaction with the status quo in America and their place in it; an aversion to or hatred of mainstream news and a corresponding preference for media that consisted of social networks and partisan outlets; and a loyalty to Trump. Aside from that, they disagreed on a lot. Some hated Jews, while others hated Jews a little but hated Black people more. Some hated women, some hated an imaginary evil cabal of baby eaters. Some believed the Constitution gave them the right to be sovereign over themselves, some were anarchists, and some were even monarchists. Members of the Korean American cult the Moonies were even there.

But as you watched these insurrectionists swarm the Capitol, climb walls, and break into buildings with the barricades they had dismantled, as you watched them set up a gallows on the Capitol steps and chant “Hang Mike Pence,” you would have been forgiven for not being able to tell the groups apart. Unless you’d been watching these subfactions closely for years — watching their YouTube channels, reading their forum conversations, following them on social media apps like Twitter and Gab, tuning into their podcasts, tracking their dramas — it would be extremely difficult to differentiate them.

For those who had been watching these communities —  there is a wide community of internet researchers, journalists, and civil society organizations who watch these communities closely — the events of that day were entirely foreseeable. They were tragic. And sad. But they were not unexpected.

The simple reason for that is that the meme wars of recent years have been tremendously successful, even as they largely ruined the lives of the people who directly engaged in them. The most powerful meme warriors now face indictment, prison, bankruptcy, and loss of family and identity, but their ideas, carried into the bloodstream of our society through memes, persist: Learn to code. It’s about ethics in journalism. Race is real. It’s OK to be white. Critical race theory. Let’s go, Brandon. Blue Lives Matter. A deep state operates extralegally inside the U.S. government.

All of these are ideas born from meme wars.

Meme wars are culture wars, accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flattens the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words, a morass capable of swallowing patience, kindness, and understanding.

Social media did not create culture wars, of course. They’ve been with us as long as we’ve had a nation. In his 1991 book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” sociologist James Davison Hunter detailed how religious conflicts in America’s diverse population evolved into the polarized, traditional-versus-progressive politic dichotomy of the time. While the now-ubiquitous term came from Hunter’s analysis, it was popularized by Nixon-administration speechwriter and paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, who co-opted the phrase back in 1992 in a speech he delivered to the Republican National Committee. He shocked the room with his claims that there was a “religious war” raging in America, one as important as the Cold War itself, and that this spiritual enemy was liberalism. This idea was embraced and built upon by media operative and publisher Andrew Breitbart, who evangelized that politics was “downstream of culture,” by which he meant that if you can shape the culture, you can shape the politics. Before social media, culture wars were spearheaded by evangelicals or radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh on the right, with progressive social movements like secularism and feminism positioned as their opponents on the left. They were amplified by TV pundits and argued over on web forums and email chains and in mailers sent to your house. Social media did to the culture wars what spinach did to Popeye — it juiced them up.

Suddenly you didn’t need a radio show to get your idea to millions of people. You just needed a viral tweet. You just needed to figure out the desires of a Facebook algorithm programmed to boost outrageous and emotionally stirring ideas, bury nuance far down your feed, and present information from your conspiracist grandmother and information from The New York Times in the exact same format, giving you the impression that they were basically the same. And more than that, the advancements on the internet in the 21st century and the advent of social media enabled culture warriors from across the country and globe to find each other and to gather in communal spaces where their ideas could grow. No longer would an Ayn Rand–obsessed teenager in a small liberal town be isolated from other libertarians; now they could just log on and find their people.

All kinds found each other. Lovers of plushy toys as well as fans of Japanese manga comic books. Globalist-hating ultraconservatives as well as beatbox hobbyists. The internet is an incredible place to build community around a common interest, however odd or specific. The common interests of the factions of the far right who have reshaped our democracy are fairly simple: they do not trust the system or the establishment in any form. The media? Establishment. The government? Establishment, unless it is being actively run by an “outsider” like Trump, who they believe is himself antiestablishment. Universities, pundits, “officials” of any kind — all of these people who enjoy cultural power and influence — are not to be trusted. This lack of trust in the establishment necessitates the creation of an alternative ecosystem for media and for experts, since even antiestablishmentarians need news and information. Thus the necessity for a far-right media landscape to inform these communities, along with the elevation of far-right influencers on social media, who are positioned as outside the mainstream liberal culture and whose cultural cachet is therefore not a liability but an asset to the communities they cater to. Folks like Alex Jones, whose Infowars community grew out of public television, moved online, and has been encouraged by its leader to #StopTheSteal or harass the parents of murdered children in Sandy Hook, all while turning a tidy profit.

This community building quickly led to communal action, once the fringe cultures of the internet realized they could adopt the tried and true tactics of social movement building, bring them online, and deploy them to accelerate the pace of change. We start our book with the story of Occupy and the ways it inspired the far-right fringe, teaching people like Breitbart and Steve Bannon, his friend and predecessor at far-right alternative news site Breitbart News Network, how to use the participatory nature of the web and the free speech free-for-all of early social media companies to launch culture wars that drew blood. These people learned how to put their audience to work fighting their wars, urging them to share hashtags, pile on to comment sections, retweet, donate, and show up in the street, empowering them to help fight the ultimate battle against the establishment and demanding that they conscript others into this battle.

This book is concerned with the insurgent use of meme wars to fight against the establishment and institutions. As you will see, many groups participate in meme wars. Governments use cyber troops to influence foreign affairs, corporations wage PR battles to sell products, activists launch memetic campaigns to change public opinion, extremists recruit using ironic memes, and conspiracy theorists piggyback their ideas into mainstream conversation with memes. When marketers use social media to grow audiences, it’s praised as innovation. When activists rally thousands for public protest using platforms, their tactics are both cheered and criticized. When conspiracy theorists used social media to spread lies and dangerous speculation, this chatter was largely ignored — until Trump took office. In that way, Trump’s election was the first social media candidacy that fully adopted meme wars as a campaign messaging strategy.

Memes can convene armies and disarm enemies; they can also mobilize large groups of people when they are fed a steady stream of violence, aggression, and replacement anxiety. It was a meme war that spilled into the streets of Washington, D.C., that day in January 2021. It was a decade of meme wars that radicalized people, that helped them forge their identities and find their communities, and it was a president and his political operatives who understand the power of meme wars who were able to send a tweet that drafted thousands into a battle against democracy itself.

Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2022 by Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg.

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Special Issue: COVID-19

This essay was published as part of a Special Issue on Misinformation and COVID-19, guest-edited by Dr. Meghan McGinty (Director of Emergency Management, NYC Health + Hospitals) and Nat Gyenes (Director, Meedan Digital Health Lab).

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Meme factory cultures and content pivoting in Singapore and Malaysia during COVID-19

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This paper is a qualitative ethnographic study of how a group of meme factories in Singapore and Malaysia have adapted their content programming and social media practices in light of COVID-19. It considers how they have fostered, countered, or challenged the rise and spread of misinformation in both countries. More crucially, the paper considers how meme factories position their contents to speak in a variety of platform-specific and age-appropriate vernaculars to provide public service messaging or social critique to their followers.

Department of Internet Studies, & School of Media, Creative Arts, and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, Australia

Research Questions

• What are meme factories, how are they organized, and what is their role in the meme ecology?
• How do meme factories participate in socio-political discourse through their contents, in light of the rise of misinformation and related information suppression laws?
• How have meme factories pivoted their content and strategies in light of the COVID-19 pandemic?

Essay Summary

• This paper considers how eight Singaporean and Malaysian meme factories serve as sentiment shapers that operate through the vernacular of visual internet pop culture. 
• Meme factories are a coordinated network of creators or accounts who produce and host content that can be encoded with (sub)text and parsed into new contexts across multiple organizational structures.
• Meme factories often use strategic calculation to obtain virality or activate a call to arms to seed decision-swinging discourses, and at times with the potential to commercialize their meme contents for sponsors.
• From the qualitative empirical data drawn from personal interviews, digital ethnography, and content analyses of social media posts, the meme factories are found to mobilize four ways of addressing, challenging, and adapting to the influx of COVID-19 related (mis)information.
• In light of Malaysia’s (recently scrapped) Anti-Fake News Act and Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), meme factories are important for non-hegemonic views to be shared and seeded in constantly evolving and playful vernaculars that may slide under the authoritative radar through subversive frivolity.

Implications 

This paper pivots from existing research on meme factories that have thus far focused on American-centric phenomena and online forums, to focus on instances of meme factories in Southeast Asia — specifically Singapore and Malaysia — and their occurrence on social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram), messaging apps (e.g. Telegram, WhatsApp), and websites.

Existing academic literature on meme factories have highlighted that they can occur as online forums (Bogerts & Fielitz, 2019; Cohen & Kenny, 2020) such as Reddit (Donovan, 2019) and 4chan (Bernstein et al., 2011; Knuttila, 2011), meme-aggregator websites (Chen, 2012, p.13), and networks of actors such as Anonymous (Jarvis, 2014). Memes have also been studied as being “factoried” in the sense of being systematically produced en mass and milked for commercial value, although not all meme factories may be monetized. They have been brand-jacked and appropriated by brands and corporations (Milner, 2016, p.3), often resulting in an uneven reciprocity of gains (i.e. income) and losses (i.e. reputation) especially when “meme personalities” — “ordinary people can be (unwittingly) captured in compromising circumstances of with notable expressions or gestures and become ionized as memes” (Abidin, 2018a, p.44) — are involved.

Features & operations of meme factories 

Through a triangulation of personal interviews, digital ethnography, and content analysis of posts published by meme factories in Singapore and Malaysia (see “ Appendix ” for detailed methods), I propose that meme factories are a coordinated network of creators or accounts who produce and host content that can be encoded with (sub)text and parsed into new contexts, often using strategic calculation to obtain virality or activate a call to arms to seed decision-swinging discourses, and at times with the potential to commercialize their meme contents for sponsors or monetize their labor. Specific to the sample in this paper, meme factories are sentiment shapers that usually operate through the vernacular of internet visual pop culture.

The meme factories studied in this paper are based in Singapore and Malaysia and founded between 2012 and 2018 (see Table 1). They operate on a variety of platforms including Facebook (pages), Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, websites, and YouTube. Meme factories can be a single creator managing a network of accounts and platforms (Figure 1) or a consolidated group of creators (Figure 2) who collaborate informally (i.e. hobby groups) or commercially (i.e. businesses). The ideation may result in contents that are strictly non-commercial, have the potential to be monetized, or are sponsored messages from the onset. Meme factories that operate across platforms may create bite-sized and long-form formats of the same contents, employ different aesthetics to convey the same message across platforms, or channel entirely compartmentalized messages on each platform.

Those catalogued in this study belong to three different modes of operations: Commercial meme factories whose core business is to create original meme content and incorporate advertising; Hobbyist niche meme factories that create or curate meme contents drawn on vernaculars and aesthetics to interest a specific target group; and Meme generator and aggregator chat groups who rely on volunteer members to collate, brainstorm, and seed meme content across other platforms.

COVID-19 content pivots

In light of COVID-19, meme factories have shifted to adopt four strategies: Firstly, some focus on producing entertainment by gauging and challenging the tonality of accepted humor in light of the rapidly progressing pandemic, and try to curb opportunistic bandwagoning; Secondly, some emphasize Public Service Announcements, adjusting between niche and mainstream references, by selectively surfacing, calling out, and amplifying specific issues for public awareness, prescribing behaviors, and shaping mindsets and discourse in the public arena; Thirdly, some pivot from meme production per se by considering alternative uses of their platform, serving as a sounding board for debate, reforming internal processes to increase the veracity of their source content; and lastly, some politicize their meme production by recentering the role of memes in the infodemic (access to required information obscured by excessive volume of competing (mis)information), challenging state censorship and authority, recalibrating new boundary lines, and calling out or catering to cross-generational consumption of memes. 

Considering Malaysia’s (recently scrapped) Anti-Fake News Act (Al Jazeera, 2019) and Singapore’s POFMA (Bothwell, 2020) — which give the state an overarching authority to be the chief arbiters of the validity of information sources and to impose severe penalties to platforms, media outlets, and individuals for sharing non-sanctioned information, thus constituting a form of authoritative censorship — the role of meme factories in playfully mainstreaming marginalized discourses and subversively challenging the status quo through humorous internet vernacular cannot be understated. They are still the spaces where non-hegemonic views are allowed to survive, thrive, and even be celebrated. They are living archives of evolving vernacular strategies that can penetrate white noise and amplify messages to specific target groups in the age of misinformation. They are factories and vehicles of “subversive frivolity” (Abidin, 2016) that continue to slide under the authoritative radar.

In the sections below, this paper considers the three original modes of operation and four new pivoted content programming strategies employed by the surveyed meme factories in the time of COVID-19. It is found that the meme factories pivoted content to align with concerns and issues surrounding the pandemic. Their original strategies and new pivots during COVID-19 were determined by a triangulation of three sources of data: Personal interviews with key personnel in each meme factory, digital ethnographic data, and content analysis of specific memes published after the onset of COVID-19 in the Southeast Asian region (see Appendix for detailed methodology). The practices are not mutually exclusive, and while some meme factories draw from a range of strategies, they will be discussed for their dominant strategy at the time of fieldwork.

Meme factories’ original modes of operation

Finding 1a) Commercial meme factories run core businesses to create original meme content and incorporate advertising

MGAG, SGAG, and World of Buzz are commercial meme factories. MGAG and SGAG are sister companies belonging to Singaporean parent company HEPMIL Media Group, and produce videos and sell merchandise alongside their (commercial) meme-making. World of Buzz is one of several platforms owned by Malaysian company Influasia, and focuses on packaging news and current affairs into digestible and social media-friendly formats. 

Finding 1b) Hobbyist niche meme factories create or curate meme contents drawn on vernaculars and aesthetics to interest a specific target group

highnunchicken, Kiasu Memes For Singaporean Teens, STcomments, and Weiman Kow are hobbyist niche meme factories.   highnunchicken and Weiman Kow produce original illustrations albeit in different styles and for different intentions. highnunchicken is a collective of four artists who produce sartorial takes on Singaporean life in the style of the New Yorker cartoons. Weiman Kow, is a hobbyist illustrator who started sharing her art on social media in 2017. Kiasu Memes For Singaporean Teens is run by a 28-year-old admin and founder who works professionally in the media industry and uses their platform as an avenue to share their creative spin on “hot topics”. STcomments is a Facebook and Instagram account managed by Ernest L who, after noticing “stupid” and “ridiculous” comments on the Facebook page of Singapore’s highest circulating English daily broadsheet  The Straits Times,  decided to collect screengrabs of these expressions. 

Finding 1c) Meme generator and aggregator chat groups rely on volunteer members to collate, brainstorm, and seed meme content across other platforms

Memes n Dreams is a   meme generator and aggregator chat group. It was first launched as a Telegram chat group in 2018, and at the time of the follow-up interview grew to over 21,000 members (“memebers”). The network is now spearheaded by 30-year-old Jackie Tan and two other admins (“admemes”). 

Meme factories’  pivoted content programming

Finding 2a) COVID-19 Pivot: Memes as entertainment

General Manager Mia of MGAG recalls that when the Movement Control Order (MCO) (Tan, 2020) was first announced, her team decided that this was a “critical time to make content to uplift the spirits” of Malaysians, especially as they are among the most prolific social media content creation companies in the country and most people will now be spending extended periods of time online. One of their in-house talents is the character ‘Penang Guy’ who has the persona of a haughty and uncouth young man, and who complains about social issues in a mixture of colloquial Malaysian English and Hokkien; in light of the MCO, MGAG produced an episode of Penang Guy calling upon Malaysians to stay home through a series of humorously disgruntled complains (MGAG, 2020). 

Likewise, CEO Karl of SGAG has directed his content production teams to focus on celebrating “heroes” and “heart-warming moments”. Prior to COVID-19, SGAG usually had focused content streams created in house and avoided reposting others’ contents too frequently. However, to “entertain the [wider variety] of people who are absolutely miserable at home” during the Circuit Breaker (Mohan, 2020), SGAG has expanded its content programming to accommodate audiences outside of their original target group. They now use their platform to reshare posts by other platforms and meme groups, as well as the “stories and content” that were created by others through the online activities and memetic challenges they have organized (Figure 3).

However, such commercial meme factories now face three tensions. Firstly, as media and advertising businesses that need to be sensitive to trending discourses online, they have had to accelerate their publication schedules. MGAG has shifted from publishing memes in six specific time slots to a rolling publication of unlimited content to immediately address or incorporate the latest COVID-19 updates in Malaysia. Mia calls this new routine “the timely meme”, in that her Creative Team are continuously on standby to create and publish original content as soon as there are new COVID-19 developments in Malaysia (Figure 4). An SGAG character Xiaoming also quickly responded to panic hoarding behaviour by staging viral photo-shoot with toilet paper as if a prized possession to lighten the mood (Ong, 2020).

Secondly, due to the rapidly shifting Out-of-Bound (OB) markers — topics censored by the state authorities and tacitly accepted and internalized by citizens, journalists, and other information providers (see George, 2012) — in-house moderation policies have to be constantly updated. MGAG’s COVID-19 meme guidelines include “non-biased” content that does not “bash [the] government”, criticize anyone, or promote negativity. To ensure that best practices are kept, MGAG’s in-house content moderator has stepped up to personally oversee and approve every meme at short notice before its launch. Similarly, SGAG has canned completed video productions before publication, and adjusted the script and subtext of their contents. Karl explains that they needed to stay “sensitive to the context of today’s climate and the situation at this point in time. It’s been a week-by-week adjustment as it gets more serious . . . [we are] being hyper-reactive to how we adjust our tonality.” The team has issued apologies and redacted content upon receiving vocal feedback, and the shelf lives of some memes have considerably shortened.

Thirdly, despite growing client demands to capitalize on the increasing online traffic, commercial meme factories have had to reconsider client requests that opportunistically capitalize on COVID-19. This is the practice of “grief hypejacking”, where users “bandwagon” on “high-visibility hashtags or public tributes” to direct publicity towards themselves or their own causes (Abidin, 2018b, p.170). Mia divulges that MGAG has had to “politely” reject some of the client requests that felt too self-promotional and exploitative of COVID-19. Karl echoes while some new clients were a natural fit for integrating COVID-19 messaging, such as insurance or internet data plans, others had to be “turn[ed] away”, likely because the clients did not understand the vernacular of meme ecologies at the current time: “our response [was] ‘No, please don’t do that, because it’s not the right time . . . to be talking about yourself right now as a brand’”.

Finding 2b) COVID-19 Pivot: Memes as public service announcements

The contents by highnunchicken and Weiman Kow during COVID-19 have decidedly served as public service announcements. highnunchicken was one of the earliest meme factories to incorporate COVID-19 into their content stream, in a 22 January comic that remixed the Wu-Tang Clan logo into a ‘Wu-Han Coronavirus” poster (Figure 5). Illustrator JZ recalls: “when [the comic was published . . . there wasn’t a name given to the virus yet . . . [the phrase] ‘Wuhan Coronavirus’ was quite common when you did some research . . . [it was meant to be a] punny joke . . .” However, to his surprise, many of their viewers were not yet aware of the Coronavirus, let alone able to decipher the pop culture reference. When it soon became public knowledge that branding COVID-19 as a ‘Chinese virus’ incited rampant racism, the illustration collective decided to shift away from “sensitive topics” to focus on localized reactions to the situation in Singapore through strategic dark humor. Since then, highnunchicken comics have addressed panic buying, misinformation from elderly relatives (Figure 6), and the underreported poor living conditions of affected migrant workers (Figure 7), among others.

For hobbyist illustrator Weiman Kow, the directive is more straightforward, as she desires to clarify health-related misinformation and provide instructions for maintaining hygiene in an accessible format: “I believe that comics… that are based on facts are very useful to communicate . . . because they’re easy to understand”. Given her background in UX, Weiman draws on open sources cultures of collaboration, and makes her comics freely available in hopes that their transmission and translations will be able to better educate the public [Figure 8]. She has also been approached by prominent corporations who have commissioned to make more COVID-19 related comics to facilitate public learning about the correct information and procedures regarding hand washing (Figure 9) and hand-sanitizing (Figure 10).

Above and beyond posting memes that are instructional or thought provoking, these meme factories also contribute to redirecting citizen attention to specific topics and amplifying particular discourses. highnunchicken’s coverage of COVID-19 usually calls out critical issues in the early stages of the information news cycle, before they develop into full-fledged national conversations. Their memes are important for publicizing ethical stances and shaping citizens’ thoughts as they are socialized into a national dialogue. JZ feels that highnunchicken’s role is to “throw out fire-starters” and provoke Singaporeans into reflecting on their behaviors: “We try to . . . address the whole situation in a funny way… call them out but also shine light on this issue to make everyone feel . . . self-aware”.

However, such memes may also be appropriated as misinformation against their creators’ wills. Weiman reports that some of her work was stolen by corporations, businesses, and brands who edited her comics into promotional content advertising health- and hygiene-related products. Others bandwagoned onto her growing microcelebrity by publicizing her memes alongside their brand name as if the artist had endorsed their products. At the time of writing, Weiman relies on the goodwill of the public to surface these instances to her.

Finding 2c) COVID-19 Pivot: New initiatives apart from meme production

STcomments and World of Buzz are meme factories whose regular content programming have incorporated COVID-19 related information, alongside a new pivot in their structure and/or processes to amplify specific types of information. The COVID-19 related posts from STcomments have called out citizens who have breached social distancing rules, citizens who are unsympathetic towards the adjustments to the education system in light of Home-Based Learning (Figure 11) and the rising xenophobia towards migrant workers in Singapore (Figure 12) These posts have sparked lengthy debates on STcomments’ Instagram and Facebook accounts wherein citizens affirm these call-outs, patiently negotiate with contrarians, or clarify misinformed takes on current affairs. STcomments thus serves as a platform for peer-education and peer-learning among citizens, and as a sounding board for negotiating the veracity of news sources and outlets against the backdrop of misconceptions. Similarly, World of Buzz has turned its content coverage to focus on COVID-19, covering ‘buzzworthy’ news stories including updates from the government, sacrifice of medical front liners especially during Ramadan (Figure 13) experiences of quarantine centers, and acts of charity (Figure 14).

However, both meme factories have also pivoted to new initiatives specifically to address COVID-19. On 4 April 2020, STcomments started a new content stream exclusively on Instagram Stories to provide “shoutouts for all local businesses/initiatives affected by the circuit breaker measures in my stories”. These shoutouts are compiled in a dedicated Instagram Story Highlight tab labelled “sgunited”, and promote small businesses including eateries, grocery delivery services, and job-seeking services, among others. Although other meme factories have monetised such advertising, this maintains a pro bono initiative by STcomments. Admin Ernest L explains: “[I’m] just trying to help out local businesses as much as we can. It isn’t much but I hope we’ve made some impact. Tough times for everyone and every little bit of help goes a long way.”

For World of Buzz which builds content for its website and Instagram page exclusively from news and social media stories, the pivot has focused on revised Standard Operation Procedures around fact-checking. The team has discovered that many reliable news outlets have published articles that extrapolated source material from non-robust outlets, or based entire news articles on speculation and rumor from internet forums. This is likely due to industry-wide pressures to publish COVID-19 related contents to retain audience interest and maintain ad revenue. The team is now training to assess and interpret primary sources such as industry and academic reports for health- and hygiene-related stories. Co-founder Michelle explains: “[We want] to ensure [that] no other publication will misinterpret [our articles], or mispresen[t] the studies [we have] dissected.” At the time of writing, Michelle is working with her employees to “reduce” the number of COVID-19 related reports they publish, to decentralize the hyper-focus on the virus and distribute reader attention across other stories.

Finding 2d) COVID-19 Pivot: Politicizing memes 

Admins of Kiasu Memes For Singaporean Teens and Memes n Dreams are using the COVID-19 infodemic to rethink the role of memes in the information ecology. The anonymous 28-year-old admin and founder of Kiasu Memes For Singaporean Teens offers that since he runs a “shit-posting site”, he is less concerned about fact-checking for his audiences whom he expects to be able to interpret cynicism and sarcasm. His recent memes have highlighted the exorbitant salaries of Ministers of Parliament in Singapore despite offering to take on pay cuts, inefficacy of Singapore’s COVID-19 contact tracing app, WhatsApp-based misinformation being circulated by boomers (Pang, 2020; Tandoc Jr & Mak, 2020) (Figure 15), and the false sense of security in donning masks when other basic hygiene practices are not kept (Figure 16).

Admin Jackie Tan of Memes n Dreams who personally oversees and moderates the memes that circulate in his Telegram group observes that trending memes has shifted over time, and serve as markers of new normals during COVID-19: “I see [the trends] shifting from memes about the virus and where it comes from… more towards quarantine memes”. More critically, Jackie feels that “these virus memes [are] also a way to cope with the situation, reflecting “people’s current living situation[s] with social distancing [measures]” in place, such as the elderly feeling loneliness from self-isolation (Figure 17), and their ability to continue making jokes despite the circumstances (Figure 18). Memes n Dreams has a relatively relaxed moderation policy that only bans sexual and overtly commercial content. While there were a handful of racist COVID-19 memes posted to the group, Jackie recalls that members have not complained and thus no action has been taken. On reflection, he offers that perhaps such crass humour has been internalized by members as group culture, or that given the very high volume of daily posts, not so much attention was paid to racist memes in the long stream of continuous content.

Both admins are reflexive about the role of their meme factories in the information ecology. The Kiasu Memes for Singaporean Teens admin desires to call out the onslaught of “rampant” misinformation and misinformed reactions he sees from “boomers” who comment on posts from the major English language news outlets in Singapore: “that’s their favourite activity . . . [to] spew whatever garbage that they can . . . [and] whenever someone online confronts them about how they are wrong, they just clam up, [or insist] that nobody [has] asked for your opinion, or nobody cares what you have to say”. One of his primary gripes is that censorship in Singapore, even of memes, seems imbalanced because none of the “boomers” spreading harmful content seem to be kept accountable. On the other hand, some meme factories have come under fire. 

The admin explains that some of his fellow meme-making peers were “called down for questioning” under Singapore’s Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) (Singapore Statutes Online, 2019a) for creating memes deemed subversive or offensive by the state. However, undeterred by this, the admin felt challenged to be more experimental and boundary-pushing with his content stream: “[I want to] toe the line a bit, and kind of push the edge and see how much I can get away with”. He explains: “I’m not trying to get arrested . . . I’m always careful about religion and politics [in lieu of Singapore’s Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act (Singapore Statutes Online, 2019b) and Sedition Act (Singapore Statutes Online, 2020)], but at the same time, it’s kind of the best content right? The most illegal things, the forbidden fruit . . .” He later reveals that the macro experiment of his meme factory is to test how “public sentiment” works in the information ecology in Singapore, and how only specific contents out of “a million other offensive posts” get “traction”, receive “public backlash”, and are escalated to “the Ministers’ eyes”.

For Jackie of Memes n Dreams, the Telegram group has become a site for members to share misinformed memes shared by boomers on WhatsApp: “[Those] memes that are circulated amongst the older generation . . . end up in our group[chat] and we have a good laugh”. Here, WhatsApp-based and Telegram-based memes are perceived as antagonists, with the popular belief that the former are more accessible, spreadable, and lack fact-checking rigour. For instance, this author has observed how some memes that started out as satirical Instagram memes shared by the young quickly evolve into misinformed folklore and misinformation by the elderly on WhatsApp (Figure 19). Jackie points to the demographic of Telegram users who are generally younger and digitally literate enough to discern between memetic humour and misinformation. He offers that satirical or cynical memes that tend to contain “instructions”, or “prescribe some kind of behaviour” have the higher tendency to mutate outside of their context and become misinformation.

Drawing on his experience as a PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences, Jackie intends to take up the challenge of educating boomers with memes, by using memes like “vaccinations”, as a form of “thought contagion” (Lynch, 1996 in Linden et al., 2017). He explains that by intentionally “exposing” boomers to a certain set of memes, the spreadability of those memes will increase. With careful planning, there are ways to “inject memes” into the boomer meme ecology to “teach them about harmful memes”. Alongside the “harmful” memes that they are already constantly spreading, the new influx of healthy memes drawn from verified sources and prescribing robust information can also help “fight the harmful” ones among the elderly. This strategy might then break the cycles of “social reinforcement” in which “people who are more likely to trust an information someway consistent with their system of beliefs” (Bessi et al., 2015), by conditioning boomers to gradual exposure and acclimatisation. Jackie adds that this is an initiative he would like to formally institute should resources and time be available to him, considering that his work as an meme admin or ‘admeme’ is (still) a (non-remunerated) labour of love.

The role of meme factories, their ability to craft timely and sticky messages, and their potential to effectively seed sentiments among the citizenry is especially important in information ecologies where governments have a tight reign over information flows and censorship. Meme factories allow democratic citizen feedback, contentious opinions, and subversive challenges to filter through to the general populace through the highly mobile and palatable of memes. They are critical avenues for grassroots activism, and hotbeds for encouraging users to hone their media literacies through an timely news-gathering, intentional fact-checking efforts, politicised call-out cultures, and a careful navigation of the ever-changing OB markers of governments who control citizen discourse.

• / Platform Regulation
• / Social Media

Cite this Essay

Abidin, C. (2020). Meme factory cultures and content pivoting in Singapore and Malaysia during COVID-19. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-031

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Pre-COVID-19 portions of the fieldwork were funded by a Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award (USA), January–December 2019.

Competing Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The research protocol was approved by Human Research Ethics board at Curtin University, Ethics Office approval number HRE2019-0275.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative  Commons  Attribution  License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to express gratitude to the meme factories, founders, and key representatives who have taken part in this study, especially for the entertainment, nuance, and subversion they bring to our internet worlds.

Data Availability

The data for this study are protected by confidentiality agreements and we are precluded from sharing the data with others.  

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6 Common Leadership Styles — and How to Decide Which to Use When

• Rebecca Knight

Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances call for different approaches.

Research suggests that the most effective leaders adapt their style to different circumstances — be it a change in setting, a shift in organizational dynamics, or a turn in the business cycle. But what if you feel like you’re not equipped to take on a new and different leadership style — let alone more than one? In this article, the author outlines the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman first introduced in his 2000 HBR article, “Leadership That Gets Results,” and explains when to use each one. The good news is that personality is not destiny. Even if you’re naturally introverted or you tend to be driven by data and analysis rather than emotion, you can still learn how to adapt different leadership styles to organize, motivate, and direct your team.

Much has been written about common leadership styles and how to identify the right style for you, whether it’s transactional or transformational, bureaucratic or laissez-faire. But according to Daniel Goleman, a psychologist best known for his work on emotional intelligence, “Being a great leader means recognizing that different circumstances may call for different approaches.”

• RK Rebecca Knight is a journalist who writes about all things related to the changing nature of careers and the workplace. Her essays and reported stories have been featured in The Boston Globe, Business Insider, The New York Times, BBC, and The Christian Science Monitor. She was shortlisted as a Reuters Institute Fellow at Oxford University in 2023. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade as an editor and reporter at the Financial Times in New York, London, and Boston.

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An NPR editor who wrote a critical essay on the company has resigned after being suspended

NEW YORK — A National Public Radio editor who wrote an essay criticizing his employer for promoting liberal views resigned on Wednesday, attacking NPR’s new CEO on the way out.

Uri Berliner, a senior editor on NPR’s business desk, posted his resignation letter on X, formerly Twitter, a day after it was revealed that he had been suspended for five days for violating company rules about outside work done without permission.

“I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems” written about in his essay, Berliner said in his resignation letter.

Katherine Maher, a former tech executive appointed in January as NPR’s chief executive, has been criticized by conservative activists for social media messages that disparaged former President Donald Trump . The messages predated her hiring at NPR.

NPR’s public relations chief said the organization does not comment on individual personnel matters.

The suspension and subsequent resignation highlight the delicate balance that many U.S. news organizations and their editorial employees face. On one hand, as journalists striving to produce unbiased news, they’re not supposed to comment on contentious public issues; on the other, many journalists consider it their duty to critique their own organizations’ approaches to journalism when needed.

In his essay , written for the online Free Press site, Berliner said NPR is dominated by liberals and no longer has an open-minded spirit. He traced the change to coverage of Trump’s presidency.

“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed,” he wrote. “It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.”

He said he’d brought up his concerns internally and no changes had been made, making him “a visible wrong-thinker at a place I love.”

In the essay’s wake, NPR top editorial executive, Edith Chapin, said leadership strongly disagreed with Berliner’s assessment of the outlet’s journalism and the way it went about its work.

It’s not clear what Berliner was referring to when he talked about disparagement by Maher. In a lengthy memo to staff members last week, she wrote: “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving their mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful and demeaning.”

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo revealed some of Maher’s past tweets after the essay was published. In one tweet, dated January 2018, Maher wrote that “Donald Trump is a racist.” A post just before the 2020 election pictured her in a Biden campaign hat.

In response, an NPR spokeswoman said Maher, years before she joined the radio network, was exercising her right to express herself. She is not involved in editorial decisions at NPR, the network said.

The issue is an example of what can happen when business executives, instead of journalists, are appointed to roles overseeing news organizations: they find themselves scrutinized for signs of bias in ways they hadn’t been before. Recently, NBC Universal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde has been criticized for service on paid corporate boards.

Maher is the former head of the Wikimedia Foundation. NPR’s own story about the 40-year-old executive’s appointment in January noted that she “has never worked directly in journalism or at a news organization.”

In his resignation letter, Berliner said that he did not support any efforts to strip NPR of public funding. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote.

David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder

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In Photos: Harvard Figure Skating Club’s Annual Showcase

On April 7, students in Harvard’s Figure Skating Club took to the ice for an annual showcase in the Bright-Landry Hockey Center. Crimson photographer A. Skye Schmiegelow captured the elegance and athleticism of their performances.

Alice J. Feng ’26 ties her ice skates as she prepares for the showcase. Feng serves as co-president of the club with Katherine Jackson ’25, and the show opened with her routine.

Feng performs a one-leg glide as she skates to “Can’t Catch Me Now” by Olivia Rodrigo.

Feng demonstrates her 14 years of figure skating experience with a Biellmann spin (left) and an I-spin (right). As co-president, she organizes practices, social events, and workshops with specially invited coaches.

Jasmine N. Wynn ’27 is the second skater to take the ice. Wynn glides and spins to the upbeat show tune “Razzle Dazzle” by Richard Gere, from the musical “Chicago.”

Alexandra J. Poret is a second year Ph.D. student at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She started figure skating as an undergraduate at MIT but has been on the ice more frequently since coming to Harvard.

Poret spins to “I’d Love to Change the World” by Jetta.

In her performance, Aylin E. Tanriverdi ’25 dances to “A Time for Us” by Barratt Waugh.

Tanriverdi skates backwards, transitions into a layback spin, and slides into a split by the end of her routine. Though Tanriverdi skated competitively in high school, this event was her first figure skating club showcase.

The showcase concludes with a performance by Han Qi, a first-year Ph.D. student at GSAS. Above, Qi skates to “Yaozu Wuqu” or “Dance of the Yao People.” The song comes from the traditional festival music of the Yao people of southern and southwestern China.

At the end of the showcase, co-president Feng presents each skater with an ice-themed bracelet for their unique and skillful performances.