memery

June 21, 2018 11:36 PM

This Is Where Internet Memes Come From
On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities(arxiv.org) [PDF]
Researchers Studied 160 Million Memes and Found Most of Them Come From Two Websites

Finally, The Most Important Memes On The Internet

GALAXY BRAIN: Write a scientific paper on memes

On The Origins Of Memes

see also:
The Web of False Information: Rumors, Fake News, Hoaxes, Clickbait, and Various Other Shenanigans

Disinformation Warfare: Understanding State-Sponsored Trolls on Twitter and Their Influence on the Web

Studying Jerks On The Internet: A Data-Driven Approach[PDF]

The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources[PDF]

posted by the man of twists and turns (24 comments total)

This confirms my biases.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 11:49 PM on June 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

What, no Tumblr?
posted by divabat at 12:23 AM on June 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is fine.
posted by chavenet at 3:56 AM on June 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

“Where do memes come from?”
“Well, first a mommy meme and a daddy meme have to hate some demographic group very much, and then...”
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:19 AM on June 22, 2018 [22 favorites]

“The_Donald is the most active one when it comes to posting memes in general,” say Stringhini and co. “It is also the subreddit where most racism and politics-related memes are posted.”

We're all making our surprised faces right now, I am certain.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:01 AM on June 22, 2018 [6 favorites]

feels sad, man.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 5:06 AM on June 22, 2018

Oh! Oh! Thank you!
posted by Young Kullervo at 5:10 AM on June 22, 2018

Among other things, this is a great takedown of the "lightning rod" idea for dealing with hateful content. It has been seriously proposed by both misguided and disingenuous people that allowing places like 4chan and T_D to exist is good for the internet, because hateful people will be drawn there and leave everyone else alone. I mean, that's always been obviously bullshit to anybody who knows the first thing about 4chan's "raids" and T_D's brigading, but here we have a completely clear and unambiguous study to point at explaining exactly why the "lightning rod" idea is stupid and bad and people who propose it should feel bad.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:36 AM on June 22, 2018 [22 favorites]

The lightning rod theory has failed. It's time to start building roach motels.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:42 AM on June 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

Me too, thanks.
posted by midmarch snowman at 5:52 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

The fact that the collective online-id took the original idea of a 'meme', which was a fairly elegant and useful concept about how value systems get transmitted, and redefined it to mean 'pictures with, like, funny/hateful/racist words on them, you know?', and then used them as a vector for some of the worst existing memes, in the original sense, is offputting to me, somehow.
posted by signal at 6:05 AM on June 22, 2018 [12 favorites]

Me too , signal. I remember using the term decades ago and having to explain it. As far as the current usage, I'm still not sure whether it means "keyboard cat" or "variations on titling an image" or what. It seems like it's used to mean anything viral.
posted by freecellwizard at 6:11 AM on June 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

The fact that the collective online-id took the original idea of a 'meme'

It is a bit ironic that the meme for meme was replaced by a more succesful meme.
posted by iamck at 6:22 AM on June 22, 2018 [30 favorites]

The claims about meme origins associated with this (not yet peer reviewed) article are over-inflated because the sample of memes is incomplete and the samples from social media platforms are not comparable.

That this study looks at memes that appear on knowyourmeme.com. The study omits Facebook. The study also omits YouTube because the researchers say they couldn't process videos, and the greatest proportion of memes (over 25%) could not be traced. Finally, most memes, especially ones not in English, do not make it onto KnowYourMeme (You can read An Xiao Mina's new book From Memes to Movements and her TED talk for a picture of global memes).

Next, there were sampling limitations. they only looked at 1% of Tweets, likely leading Twitter to be under-estimated. With 100% tweets, it's likely that they would see a greater proportion of Twitter in this dataset. From their perspective, that's fine, because they're not really comparing volumes between platforms- their main analyses look *within* platforms and compare proportions (such as proportions of racist versus non-racist memes shared).

Finally, when defining the "origin" of a meme, they are simply reporting what KnowYourMeme says the origin of the meme is- that's not actually a main claim of their paper

Abetter summary of the main claims in the press would be:

Among English language memes that KnowYourMemes pays attention to, within the 55% or so that the researchers looked at, and where archives were available, KnowYourMeme researchers reported YouTube as the primary origin of memes, Twitter and 4chan as similarly large, and Tumblr/reddit as comparable origins for memes.

posted by honest knave at 6:34 AM on June 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

I was about to say that knowyourmeme.com is liable to have a source bias, but I see that honest knave beat me to it.
posted by clawsoon at 6:45 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Mods are asleep, post ponies!
posted by SPrintF at 7:19 AM on June 22, 2018

It seems like it's used to mean anything viral.

Which was always the original Dawkinsian sense anyway, so it seems like we've come full circle on it.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:34 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

What, no Tumblr?

In my experience tumblr memes tend to stay within their own ecosystem, or they just spread memes that originated from other sites.
posted by picklenickle at 8:12 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Big mood.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:23 AM on June 22, 2018

Thanks for the breakdown of limitations of the study, honest knave. It's not a bad study by itself and the paper is careful in what it claims, but the reporting is overbroad.

The main limitation I'm concerned about is they went looking specifically for vile political memes and traced them back to the two biggest American vile political communities. This result is not a surprise. I'm wondering how they'd do applying their analysis tools to a broader sample.
posted by Nelson at 10:24 AM on June 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Mods are asleep, post ponies!

...and the first illustration of the meme in that link says, "Mods are asleep, post CP", which is... ugh... a good illustration of the ugly places that the original link is talking about.
posted by clawsoon at 10:51 AM on June 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

It seems like there's a whole world of Facebook memes not addresses here. There was a great piece in The Awl (RIP) about moms posting Minions memes. This piece talks about it too.

Related: Here's an article about ISIS Cats.
posted by latkes at 11:41 AM on June 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

Anyone else remember Church of Virus? Was like - a Meme church based on the original pre-2002 era of memery...

Tragedy;farce, yada yada.
posted by symbioid at 12:28 PM on June 22, 2018

am I misreading it though? they're not suggesting that the word "meme" is now confined to like, racist memes only, are they? because that's just... not even remotely true. so why not say like "racist memes"? idk the title made me think it was going to be a history of memes.
posted by LeviQayin at 7:29 AM on June 24, 2018 [3 favorites]