This paper examines how a traumatic South American symbol—the death flights used by Southern Cone dictatorships in the 1970s–1980s—has been repurposed as a viral meme. Over the past decade, this symbol of extrajudicial execution resurfaced as the “free helicopter rides” meme on platforms such as 4chan, circulating as coded alt-right rhetoric. This transformation ruptures historical memory, as a symbol of state terror is appropriated, recast through U.S. political antagonisms, and reshaped within Global North digital cultures. While research has mapped alt-right speech and meme dynamics, little examines how Global South symbols are decontextualized, commodified, and re-exported.

Using a mixed-methods approach—combining computational analysis of 2013–2023 /pol/ posts, qualitative meme tracing, and cross-platform digital ethnography—the study reconstructs six stages in the meme’s trajectory: from disappearance regimes to U.S. alt-right adoption, commodification via global marketplaces, and reentry into South America as consumer products. The findings show how memetic far-right cultures, together with platform infrastructures, detach and monetize historical trauma, producing memetic trauma extractivism in which Global North actors recode, commodify, and resell symbols of Global South violence. The analysis underscores the need for interdisciplinary, data-driven research on how digital culture circulates and commercializes traumatic memory, reshaping global relations of meaning and power.

A growing scholarly debate points to resentment as a central factor in the worldwide advance of far-right movements. This study explores how such a dynamic appears in memes shared within far-right public discussion groups on WhatsApp in Brazil. Based on an interpretive approach, we examined 40 images collected from a non-probabilistic sample of groups supportive of Bolsonaro. The analysis identifies four distinct manifestations of resentment: hostility, victimhood, revisionist narratives, and a sense of urgency.

This paper explores how anti-veg*nism humor memes on Instagram fuel hate speech and reinforce hegemonic masculinities. A critical visual analysis (Rose, 2016) of 28 memes from the profile @lagrimasdevegano (veganstears) reveals that disparagement humor (Ford, 2015) disguises prejudice as jokes, promoting intolerance and gender stereotypes. These memes link veganism to fragility and femininity, reinforcing conservative ideologies that glorify meat consumption as a marker of masculinity. The study underscores the difficulties digital platforms face in regulating such content, given humor’s ambiguity and a maximalist interpretation of free speech. It advocates for culturally sensitive moderation and media education to create a more inclusive digital space.

This working paper offers a conceptualization of platformed nostalgia as a social media platform branding strategy that commodifies historical social media nostalgia, in combination with discourses of corporate social responsibility, to (re)gain social acceptance, symbolic value, and desirability amidst a landscape marked by crisis and distrust. I elaborate on this concept through an analysis of Tumblr's marketing and governance to consider how the platform has, since its acquisition by Automattic in 2019, co-opted popular nostalgic discourses about an imagined ‘simpler’ past of social media prior to the ascendancy of Big Tech. I will ask: to what extent, and in what ways, has Tumblr platformed historical social media nostalgia? What contexts and discourses have shaped Tumblr’s courting of historical social media nostalgia? What does this suggest about how the platform wishes to be understood and interpreted within the cultural imaginary?

I argue that Tumblr's use of the nostalgic register intensified following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) in 2022. The platforming of nostalgia has enabled Tumblr to discursively position itself within the cultural imaginary as the past in the present and as a liberal foil to illiberal competitors like X. Here, Tumblr reconfigures itself as a folk hero (rather than failure) amongst the giants; its obsolescence no longer evaded but celebrated. These discursive interventions allow us to elucidate what Tumblr views, or wants us to view, as its role and influence in social media history, even if this does not necessarily gel with the platform’s internal priorities and policies in practice.