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| It’s the 2026 version of those salacious penny dreadfuls and news rags of Victorian London that drooled over the grim details of rapes and murders while taking the sting out of the hard facts with their florid, melodramatic language and overwrought, cartoonish illustrations. Jeffrey Epstein and his grim deeds have been catastrophically anaesthetised online through memes, those socially contagious images, videos and phrases. Lily Isaacs writes about how the convicted paedophile’s navy quarter-zip sweater has become a TikTok trope, with, astonishingly, a version of the sweater on sale, like a copy of the sort of bizarre, grisly relic of a crime you might find in the Chamber of Horrors. A generous explanation might be that people have to find a way to process and laugh their way through hideous stories. Yet the cost is grave: every time an Epstein dancing video is viewed the victims are dehumanised a little more. And those videos are rife. There are around 64,000 Epstein-related ones on TikTok alone – many are memes, some AI generated, some not. “Memes flatten reality into irony and disintegrate consequence,” writes Isaacs. “Don’t fall for the trap: the algorithm is trying to destabilise the truth of this system.” Click here to read more → |
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