You Are Not Immune to Propaganda

About

You Are Not Immune to Propaganda refers to a drawing of Garfield captioned with the text "You Are Not Immune to Propaganda." It is most popular on Tumblr, where it has been used as a reaction image to instances of people praising brands, implying that the original poster was unaware they were being affected by effective marketing.

Origin

On March 21st, 2018, Tumblr user MarkVomit^[1] posted the original image to the site, where it gained over 69,000 notes (shown below).

Spread

In the following months, the image began spreading online to other social media sites. On June 20th, 2018, it was posted to /r/LateStageCapitalism,^[2] where it gained over 470 points. On Tumblr, it has been used in discourse about the role of advertising on social media. For example, in a long thread in which several users were discussing the presence of brands appearing relatable on social media, such as Wendy's Twitter Account and Sunny Delight's Depressive Tweets, user lostinspaceandmeaning posted the image (shown below, left). On March 4th, 2019, user @doppelgender posted a photoshopped version of the image in response to a person referencing the meme (shown below, right).

The image grew ubiquitous to the point where reinterpretations of it began spreading on Tumblr as well. For example, user TGGeko posted a drawing of a realistic cat with the phrase (shown below, left). User Fuliajulia created an edit in which the text was replaced with Bode (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References