Meme Magic

It predates 2016: Shira Chess (2023) traces it to mid-1990s occult text files and to Kirk Packwood's Memetic Magic (2004), on using online images to manipulate reality.

Shira Chess, 'Magic in the Air: Memes, Esoterica, and the Internet', Selected Papers of #AoIR2023 (2023), section 'Historicizing Meme Magic'

The claim, voiced on 4chan around the 2016 US election, that spreading memes changes real events.

Sources2 sources

Primary source

Tara Isabella Burton, Apocalypse Whatever, Real Life, 2016, 13 December 2016On 4chan Kek was an ironicised divinity invoked to account for meme magic, the online affirmation of something coming true offline.
when something espoused and affirmed in the digital realm also becomes true beyond it

Scholarship

Shira Chess, Magic in the Air: Memes, Esoterica, and the Internet, Selected Papers of #AoIR2023, 2023, section 'Historicizing Meme Magic'Meme magic predates 2016: it appears in mid-1990s occult text files, and Kirk Packwood's Memetic Magic (2004) proposed using online images to manipulate reality; Chess links it to Spare's sigil magic.
Memetic Magic (2004) suggests that a magician can use images