Image: Sifa Tisambi/Fulcrum
In the past year, the internet has developed a strange reflex: when the possibility of global conflict arises online, so do the jokes.
During moments when headlines gesture toward the threat of a third world war, social media fills almost instantly with memes — ironic edits, exaggerated panic and detached humour about something that, historically, has meant mass death and displacement.
We are watching this shift happen in real time. Instead of fear or urgency, many people — myself included, at first — respond with ironic distance. That initial response reflects how digital culture trains audiences to process global conflicts. Recognizing that instinct, however, is the first step in questioning it.
TikTok, X and Instagram are filled with posts that frame global escalation as just another inconvenience, recycling the same images of chaos repackaged as humour. The reaction is not exactly apathy, but something equally unsettling: the normalization of comic relief in times of crisis.
This normalization reflects a form of soft power operating through internet memes, often reinforcing the interests of dominant ideologies. The more these memes are shared, the more they shape cultural narratives and public perception. Still, soft power can be identified by examining the narratives these memes promote.
Soft power refers to the ability to influence the masses toward a desired outcome through attraction rather than coercion or payment. The concept is key to understanding the influence memes have on our society. Unlike earlier forms rooted in film, music and visual art, the rapid algorithm-driven circulation of internet content reinforces particular perceptions of the West and its norms — often in contrast to the Global South and a constructed “Other.”
This distance is not evenly distributed. Many users creating and sharing these memes are in Western contexts, where the likelihood of experiencing war firsthand is significantly lower. For those living in regions where conflict is ongoing, war is not hypothetical or ironic — it is lived, immediate and irreversible.
It is striking how quickly humour replaces engagement with the issue at hand. The meme becomes the event. And the joke becomes the reaction. In that process, something serious is flattened into something digestible and shareable.
Some memes depict the expectation of entering the new year with excitement, only to be met with global instability.
Others joke about laughing at the “World War III memes,” only to look up and see that the “sun suddenly comes out at 10 p.m.” This kind of post is largely shared by western audiences that are far removed from the immediate impacts of war.
Another common format centres on jokes about being drafted. This type of content underscores a position of relative safety, where the threat of conscription becomes a punchline rather than a lived experience.
Not all memes operate in the same way. Comparing WW3 memes to more explicitly political meme culture shows how humour can shift from coping mechanism to an ideological tool.
These memes often operate as a form of collective coping. They emerge in moments of uncertainty and allow people — particularly younger audiences — to process fear through exaggeration and absurdity. Jokes about being “unfit for the draft” or turning geopolitical tension into personal inconveniences relies on self-deprecation rather than targeting a specific group. In that sense, they can diffuse anxiety, even as they risk trivializing the scale of the issue.
This distinction matters because it shows that memes are not politically neutral. What is lost in this process is empathy. When a crisis becomes content, the people living through it risk becoming abstractions — reduced to symbols, backdrops or punchlines in someone else’s joke.
In a culture that turns everything into something shareable, the real challenge may not be learning how to laugh, but learning when not to.
