Directly influencing someone’s beliefs, attitudes, or preferences in ways that fall short of what an empathetic observer would deem normatively appropriate in context.

The core argument is that these decentralized, politically mobilized, and meme-savvy activists deployed a set of disinformation memes and framings that altered the election. Serious anthropological and computational work, in addition to the work of Marwick and Lewis, supports the argument that these meme campaigns had significant impact on the campaign.