Short Abstract

Memes now beat bulletins to “breaking”. This roundtable asks how humour, outrage and remix act as first reports while producers verify every frame. We debate public interest, platform freedoms, harms—and what truth might look like in a 90-second future.

Description

In today’s platformed public sphere, the meme is often the first draft of the crime story: a punchline posted while the facts are still putting their shoes on. Within minutes of a high-profile incident, timelines fill with riffs, remixes and “expert” threads; meanwhile, producers and journalists work through the decidedly un-memeable crafts of rights clearance, time-stamping, source triangulation and avoiding defamation. The result is a temporal mismatch worthy of farce: a 90-second meme economy versus a multi-week verification grind.

Co-convened by South African crime-show producer Lizette Strydom and Australian-born digital artist Kailum Graves, this roundtable examines how humour, speed and shareability co-produce attention, public interest and harm. When do memes surface community knowledge, and when do they launder rumours with a laugh track? How do open-source sleuthing, platform policies and “content moderation in the wild” intersect with industry-grade fact-checking? What obligations persist to families, victims and audiences when the joke has already lapped the globe—twice?

Contribution to STS & EASST 2026 (“more-than-now”): We treat memes as infrastructural signals—tiny socio-technical devices that assemble publics, scaffold facts and distribute risks across humans and non-humans (algorithms, recommender systems, provenance tools, bots). Leaning into futures worth realising, we sketch verification-by-design pathways for crime storytelling that privilege provenance over pure speed, and collaboration over siloed heroics.

Streams addressed: Transitions (newswork under platform logics); Speculating (futures of provenance and auditability); Collaborating (producers, OSINT, platforms, scholars, families); Frontiers (gen-AI, authenticity infrastructure); Resilience (harm mitigation as a system property); Next natures (non-human actors shaping visibility).