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The following study aims to investigate how Internet Memes can manifest themselves in the political campaigns created by Swiss political group Operation Libero. For that purpose, a collection of 64 Internet Memes that were published on Operation Libero's Facebook page in referendum campaigns between February 2016 and February 2020 was gathered. A close reading based on both multimodality theory and the discourse historical approach addresses the questions of how arguments are created within Internet Memes with regards to both images and text and how they interact with the broader political discourse. The overarching purpose of this study is to shed light on how this specific phenomenon within digital election campaigns functions and how it can be utilized as a tool for political persuasion.

Satire has been present in various different media throughout the centuries. With the rise of television, satire has made its way onto TV screens via various outlets including news parodies. As these TV shows began using social media, new forms of satire have appeared, among them satirical Internet Memes commenting on political events. The objects of interest in this study are Memes published by two German news parodies Heute Show and Extra 3 on the platform Facebook that thematise the G-20 summit, which took place in Hamburg in 2017. My data set consists of 27 Memes from the platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as the public Facebook comments published alongside these Memes. Using an empirical, data-driven approach to my investigation, I broach questions regarding the way Memes make use of satire and how they interact with the Internet as a medium, and in particular, their affordances on the platform Facebook.