“This is what young people do, this is how young people understand the world, this is how they talk about it”
Everyone involved has a full-time job or student status outside of Ireland Simpsons Fans.With an average of 300 posts per day, a seemingly endless amount of disputes to deal with - some on the notably hostile side - an uncertain future for its chief hosting platform and no real discernible method of making money, the role of custodian isn't all fun and games.
"That’s why the same scenes are always reproduced, I think. I was talking to a UK journalist recently; he was asking why is it so popular with regards to Brexit and Trump and so on. "Certain things are made easier to understand in how they’re expressed through memes. Not even necessarily just Simpsons memes, but things like a united Ireland and the Repeal movement, of which there was a lot of conversation around.
"Our biggest advantage over mainstream news sites or any news sites is that we don’t need to generate the content ourselves," she says. News breaks on Twitter in under 280 characters with the story fleshed out and packaged properly later. The copy may be clean, clear and correct, but by the time you hit 'publish', people may have moved on, with or without accurate details.
What about when something of a notably difficult nature begins to dominate the news cycle? Ní Chonaill cites 2018's high profile "When a particularly big talking point happens, we get worried," she says. "A Simpsons meme page just isn’t part of that conversation, where it’s all done by activists and organisers over decades," Leahy explains.
"You get people going, ‘Ah lads, can you not take a joke?’ and sure, we get it if you’re just being light-hearted and making a joke, but what happens is you are fuelling other people who aren’t." "Anything that we might do that might piss off one guy, to know that we’re helping a group of people who are happy that we’re sticking up for them, makes it worthwhile.""We’ll mute them for a day and that urge that they might have to call someone a Nazi will pass," says Leahy.
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