An interview with Political Bible, the meme page all over your Facebook timeline

In just two short years, the Facebook page Political Bible has become the leading creator of viral satirical content about UK current affairs. In a world exclusive, we sat down with one of the admins to talk memes, dreams and social media schemes in PB’s first ever interview….

Since being founded you’ve covered two general elections, the EU referendum, multiple leadership contests and the installation of Donald Trump as American President. Surely, we are living in a golden age of meme-able material?

Quite right, you would be surprised how soon our fans get tired of certain topics though. For a while we had a ban on any Donald Trump content for instance as it was driving fans away and was frankly mundane.

Your page has been going since March 2015 and today has over 167,000 likes. When did you first know it had taken off and gone viral?

Within the first week of the page being published an original video (David Cameron: Retirement) went rather viral with a fair few views so it was probably around then that myself and another admin realised that the page’s theme had great potential. One of the key indicators that we had gone reasonably viral was when friends started saying that friends of theirs had liked the page without knowing who had made it.

How many people are involved in making the memes and how do you all know each other?

We maintain a team of about 10 guys, the team often changes in order to keep the content fresh and to keep current members on their toes. 3 of us know one another from school and the rest are people that expressed an interest to join us over the internet.

It used to be the case that you created most of the memes being published. Now you serve more as an aggregator of material produced by lesser known meme pages. How did this transition come about?

To produce original content (which we still do) it requires a lot of time, the entire team bar one are students with demanding day to day activities therefore if we were to continue producing original content AND maintain the number of posts we would need a much larger team which is impractical. People often send in original content but it’s often not up to the mark.

Which topics in politics offer the most ‘meme-able’ material?

We find that anything relatable and topical will do well with our audience. Corbyn’s recent appearance at Glastonbury for instance was very “meme-able”.

Which politicians and subject matters do you most enjoy making memes about?

When a page brings to life a reasonably unknown politician, that’s when it gets good. Five years ago, you just wouldn’t have known who “The” Jacob Rees-Mogg was, now you do.

What has been your most popular meme?

The 20p coin meme posted on Brexit morning, surprisingly not that funny but there you go.

Is it more fun to satirise Labour or the Tories?

Personally, I love taking the piss out of the left, others on the page prefer to mock the right. Fans have told us in the past how they appreciate the fact that we are (despite what you may think) unbiased, this is down to the fact that we have a team member from all major parties (Greens just aren’t a party).

Do you get any abuse for making memes about certain topics?

Yes. Not so long ago we were unpublished by Facebook because we had been reported many times. Smaller pages can get away with posting content like that but we no longer can. It has got to a point where we have a set of guidelines on what can and cannot be posted so to ensure we are not unpublished again.

Do memes serve any non-comedic purpose?

Some may believe that memes guide the youth vote of the General Election, whilst this may be true I think you have to be a special kind of stupid (left wing) to form a view based on a satirical post from some page on Facebook. I think that a meme is almost a comment or an utter on a current event, in that sense I suppose you could call its purpose non-comedic.

Your Twitter account only has a paltry 702 followers. Why do you think memes work so much better on Facebook than on Twitter?

Honest answer is that we just don’t use Twitter that often at all. Twitter is almost an entirely different platform in the sense that peak times and engagement differ from that of Facebook.

Where do you see the page going in the future?

In the future, we intend on creating a website with a non-satire section, an opinion section and a vast bank of memes (some not suitable for Facebook). The important thing for us at the moment is to retain and grow our following, by publishing clickbait we are only going to lose followers by appearing cheap and tacky. We also intend on running a successful YouTube Channel with political commentary and interviews.

Do you know whether your FB audience tend to be more left or right leaning?

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