Peeking behind the Memes: Evaluating the Boundary Work of Online Communities through Shared Memes

This paper evaluates how online communities (OC) use memes as part of their boundary creation vis-à-vis other groups online. To examine how an OC’s boundaries are depicted within memes, we build on social identity theory and derive three different types of boundaries essential for demarcating an OC as a distinct actor. To ensure a systematic evaluation of memes’ featured boundaries and sustain our findings, we evaluate each meme along with its featured themes and the type of role attributed to its main character(s). This framework guides our qualitative content analysis of memes shared by the subreddit r/The_Donald on the platform Reddit. Moreover, we demonstrate that significant offline events, such as Trump’s presidential election, affect the boundary work of this subreddit. Our results underscore memes’ merit for establishing boundaries between OCs, highlighting the complex interplay between boundary types, themes, and roles contributing to an OC’s boundaries and identity.