Aim. The article is devoted to the description of a new type of media text as one of the main units of network communication - the Internet meme. The main purpose of the article is a comprehensive description of the Internet meme as a multimodal text that reflects social and political events, national and cultural features of the Internet audience life. Methodology. The identification of the main factors determining the popularity of some Internet memes is performed using linguistic, linguoculturological and cognitive analysis of examples presented in Russian, English and German. Results. Emotionality, humour, media orientation , intertextuality, as well as polymodality are identified as the main features of the Internet meme. These characteristics play an important role in the linguistic interpretation of these texts. Research implications. The practical importance and theoretical value of studying the status of the Internet meme in the science of language is realized through the disclosure of its linguistic and pragmatic potential, which is formulated in details in the text of the article.