As Election Day approaches, students are sharing their political beliefs around campus and on social media in lots of different ways. One student, senior Brian Lam, created a prank website to share his—and has since generated over 1.5 million page views.

Lam’s website, www.votefortrumppence.com, has only one feature: a meme of himself with a straight face, holding up the middle finger. The text on the photo reads “Just Kidding.”

The meme displayed on Lam’s website votefortumppence.com. The page has generated over 1.5 million page views.

In the context of the current American political climate, Lam considers his antics especially relevant.

“This is a particularly ugly election, where people are just really caught up in fighting against each other. It’s not a fight between political beliefs, per se, it’s more of a fight between core characteristics you can’t change, like how you grew up and your ability to sympathize with people who haven’t had the same life experience as you,” Lam said. “People are really upset and having something funny distracted me for a bit—at least now I can laugh about [politics] and not have to think about hatred so much.”

But the site, which has garnered heavy traffic and attention on social media, originated not in Lam’s advocacy for a specific candidate, but as a shower-thought gag originally pertaining to Imo’s Pizza.

“I was showering and I thought it would be funny, since Imo’s pizza tastes like cardboard, if I bought Imo’s pizza and uploaded a video of myself crying. The domain was taken, so I looked around and saw this [domain] and I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was a mistake, but it was just free. I wasn’t actively trying to support Hillary [Clinton], I just don’t like [Donald] Trump, and thought it would be a funny opportunity,” Lam said.

With the media exposure comes backlash, and Lam noted that it’s been difficult to sift through the hateful and encouraging feedback he’s received.

“It’s weird seeing people anonymously love me and hate me on the Internet. Twitter has been all positive, Imgur has been awesome, Reddit for the most part too, but 4chan got really ugly, there are some racial slurs and attacks against me on there,” Lam said. “It’s weird because some Trump supporters reached out to me directly on Facebook, and were upset, but none of them called me a racial slur, like some people did on anonymous message boards.”

Above all else, Lam treats his lighthearted form of internet activism as a step towards a more positive political culture.

“I think people should take politics seriously, but after a certain point, I was just done being angry, and I wanted to do something kind of funny,” Lam said. “I think it’s more effective to make someone laugh to get a point across than it is to follow the anger.”