LEGAL SIDE OF MEME CULTURE IN INDIA

In today's digital era everyone uses social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook to communicate, share and engage with each other and the whole world. Sharing of thoughts, opinions , jokes, reactions on every matter and world affairs is possible because of these social media platforms.

Memes are images, videos, writings , posts containing humorous ways of presenting world affairs and entertainment purposes through various social platforms. Youngsters   engage more with sharing memes and create pages to circulate them and because not every meme is funny aur just for fun some are actually offensive and violative. Bullying and defaming anyone to look cool is the new meme culture. To hide and cover one's insecurities they can bully or defame anyone even if the person is just doing something for showcasing talent or entertainment purpose.

Influence of meme culture

The rising meme culture has both positive and negative impacts. The positive side is it gives a sense of stress relief, comfort and obviously a good laugh. We share our thoughts, views and humour with our friends, family and colleagues. Some funny memes like “pooja what is this behaviour?” “7 crore!!!!!” and many more hilarious funny memes are actually funny and non harmful. These types of memes are what we can call light-hearted comedy. But as we talk about the negative side some meme makers with inferiority complex majorly create memes defaming or insulting others and obviously not in a funny accepted way. They just want to spread hate, insult and defamation to others. Such types of memes only spread hate and criticism. In the name of “dark comedy” such disgusting and offensive memes are shared and circulated. Serious issues like rapes, murder, suicides, assaulting are being normalized in the name of comedy which is extremely wrong.

Today's youth is immensely influenced with this so-called dark comedy as it is considered cool and trending. As a society we really need to differentiate between a clean comedy and pathetic dark humour, there is a fine line between joking and insulting someone or something.

Mentality behind negative meme culture

Psychology behind negative memes is the fear of no acceptance and inferiority complex. The sense of better feeling after criticizing someone or defaming leads to spreading of such negative memes. 

We also in a trap of social media influence interact and engage with negative memes. Instead of raising voice and shutting down these we often either ignore it or consider it as dark comedy.

Meme culture is actually spreading the wrongs more than the fun and jokes part. If we take an example saying something on rapes and threats is not a matter of joke rather it is a serious problem and instead of making jokes about it in name of dark comedy strict awareness is required among the people. It is really upsetting to see that nowadays even the educated people are following and creating these pathetic memes.

Can you sue or be sued for memes sharing? 

The constitution of India under article 19 gives right to speech and expressions but only to the extent that is not objectionable. Further many laws are there under BNS and BNSS which strictly prohibits the person from using obscene language, videos and images publicly.

Sometimes people have copyrights over certain images, videos and another person cannot use it for their personal use. This is also included in meme culture that one cannot copy or take someone else's copyrights. One can file a complaint against defamation through memes under digital assault or mental harassment.

Social media platforms are the basis of meme culture spreading and it is to be checked and taken care of that negative memes must not be promoted and any if then immediate action to shut them off must be taken. As a society we should also understand that not everything is a joke and not everything can be taken as a matter of so-called dark jokes and humour. 

This article is authored by Anushka Agarwal. She was among the Top 40 performers in the Corporate Law Quiz Competition organized by Lets Learn Law.