This meme shows Bill Gates holding some sort of vaccine. The meme states “We need to decrease the world’s population”, and under reads “I have a vaccine for that”. This meme is harmful because it is attacking 2 things, Bill Gates and the Covid-19 vaccine that has recently come out for us to take and is highly controversial for some people. People often use highly recognizable people in harmful memes so that the people viewing them can recognize them more easily and they can gain more publicity. I believe that harmful memes spread much more rapidly than memes that carry a positive message. This is because people often implement negative humor, controversial topics and unorthodox ways of showing the things they believe in. Memes are relatively a new thing, and spreading negativity or false information through them can spread throughout young people that often view memes everyday through big social media platforms such as instagram, Facebook and even snapchat. Making a meme that shines more of a positive message tend to be thrown under the radar. My goal is to attempt to make a meme that spreads positive and true information regarding the vaccine, but I already know that it would not gain as much publicity as the one I found online.

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The meme that I created below most likely would only appeal to people that like Bill Gates are are in favor of the covid-19 vaccine. The humor and sarcasm in the other meme most likely will draw more attention than this one would because memes that are controversial, humorous and harmful usually catch the eye more than a meme trying to defend somebody for doing something good. This meme that I created sends the message that Bill Gates does not have to use his wealth whatsoever to help create vaccines but does anyway and to attack him through various memes that the covid-19 vaccine and other vaccines Gates has funded and helped with are trying to kill people to lower the population is a ridiculous statement. I believe on social media, harmful memes will always outshine positive ones. In order to balance/regulate harmful and positive memes, you yourself have to make decisions on who you follow online, what social medias you use and what you choose to believe. In the prompt for task 9, we received a link to yes magazine which was created to specifically only post good, positive news. Choosing to view these sites that implement only positive memes and news can be a good way to view less negative/fake news. I believe that there is not really much we can do to flood out the negative memes with positive simply because controversial and hateful things usually gain more publicity just because how out there they are and how many people think they are funny.