As social media continuously expands into people’s lives, most people often find themselves following the trends found online or laughing due to “memes”. A “meme” is usually a humorous picture, video, or text that is shared online by various users. They often involve imitation or a sarcastic response to a certain topic or event.

As memes grow in popularity within the online community, many people use them as a way to respond to serious topics occurring worldwide. In a way people may react with memes as a coping mechanism towards the serious events happening, but some users simply take it too far.

While the media is often seen as a place where you can anonymously say as many things as you want, it doesn’t give people the right to turn a serious topic or situation into a joke through things such as memes.

More often than not you’ll find a meme online mocking victims of tragic events such as school shootings or police brutality, with disrespectful captions making fun of their experiences. Memes have also been found to be used as ways people joke about serious topics such as abortions, abuse, rape, suicide, bullying, and many more.

Even if people don’t think much of it because it’s something posted online, I personally believe there is a certain boundary people shouldn’t cross when referring to events or serious topics through memes. People should learn to be more mature and it’s quite concerning to know how this dark humor in memes is spreading so rapidly in online communities.

Imagine you just suffered from a traumatic experience, for example a school shooting, and you go online a few days later only to see hundred of memes on multiple accounts making fun of your experience as a survivor. I imagine it wouldn’t be anything pleasant. People need to understand that they’re correlating this dark humor in memes to real life events that have terribly affected people in multiple ways.

You can’t just throw these serious matters around like a joke without a care, instead together we should be working towards something to fix it.

Many people may disagree, saying it’s just a joke that it’s not meant to be taken seriously but the truth is someone out there will take these things literally. By saying that it’s just “a joke” won’t solve the damage already done.

Try to imagine if someone came up to you and said some pretty vulgar things to you, and later said it was a joke. How would you feel? Even if they had told you later that it was it was a joke your feelings would’ve most likely already been hurt.

This dark humor brought on by memes should be controlled somehow, it’s not right to have online users joke about serious matters that need a different kind of attention. Even if people find these posts funny it shouldn’t be this popular and accepted among online communities.