USA to China, the political answer to the Covid-19 crisis has been to temporary restrict some human rights. Political actors across the globe, such as the OECD (Gurría 2020), the French Republic (Macron 2020), and the United Nations (Guterres 2020), have compared the pandemic to war, using this well-known rhetoric to justify their economic and political actions. The pandemic requires a coordinated and measured response, yet do we really need to add the metaphor of war to the ambient stress? Flusberg et al. (2018: 9) explain that war metaphors are used to 'capture people's attention, trigger emotional responses, tap into a rich source of schematic knowledge, and lead people to take a stand and form particular opinions on a wide range of issues.' In a cognitive and semantic perspective (Wagener 2019), war is an easy conveyor of meaning: unfortunately, every citizen knows what war is or has an idea of what war could be. War is always against someone or something; it draws a line between the good (us) and the bad (them). This dichotomy leaves no room for ethical complexity. Every political action is aimed at winning. Any criticism becomes inaudible or suspicious: if you are not with us, you are against us. Using the war metaphor makes it easier to understand the Covid-19 pandemic, yet it also reduces our potential political choices for action. On the opposite side, there is always an enemy. Enemy images, and enemies, are made by accusations, condemnations, and denunciations. This war propaganda, or war talk, is psychological preparation

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The use of memes and GIFs has a significant influence on interactions in social networks and online forums. As productions or utterances, these modes of communication benefit from thorough research works, notably led by Shifman, thus impacting many different scientific fields-such as linguistics, semantics, and communication studies. This situation is linked to the recent emergence of memes and GIFs, and also to their complex intertwining of discursive, visual, and videographic signs, thus leading to a polysemic communicative phenomenon. In this paper, I wish to show how memes and GIFs work by analyzing scientific studies and looking at the digital dynamics in online interaction, and on the possible impact on the offline world, in a postdigital perspective. The aim is to propose an approach based on the communicational role played by memes and GIFs, and also to underline the fact that they do represent a new form of human discourse, enriched by cultural references, popular culture and individual, and collective creativity.

The aim of this paper is not to look directly at lies, bullshit, and fake news as a phenomenon drawing on a digital as well as neodigital era, but rather to analyze how their emergence is linked to underlying systemic processes. In this perspective, we wish to understand the functioning of online communication and interactions, in order to analyze why these new processes of socialization trigger a heavy production of fake news, bullshit facts, and viral misinformation.