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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

At The Conversation [theconversation.com],

Think of an internet meme and you’ll probably smile. The most memorable viral images are usually funny, from Distracted Boyfriend to classics like Grumpy Cat. But some memes have a much more sinister meaning. They might look as innocuous as a frog, but are in fact symbols of hate. And as memes have become more political, these hateful examples have increasingly found their way onto mainstream social media platforms.

My colleagues and I recently carried out the largest scientific study of memes to date, using a dataset of 160m images from various social networks. We showed how “fringe” web communities associated with the alt-right movement, such as 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” board (/pol/) and Reddit’s “The_Donald” are generating a wide variety of racist, hateful, and politically charged memes – and, crucially, spreading them to other parts of the internet.

Don't you see this? Dank memes illegally immigrating across the internets, bent on destroying out civilization! Built the meme wall now!! But, maybe we can defend ourselves with science!

We started by looking at images posted on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and Gab. The latter is a Twitter-like social network positioning itself as a “champion” of free speech, providing shelter to users banned from other platforms. You might have heard of it in the context of the recent Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

We grouped visually similar images from this collection using a technique called perceptual hashing, which involves creating a unique fingerprint-style way to identify each image based on its features. Then we identified groups of images that belonged to the same meme and annotated them using metadata obtained from Know Your Meme, a comprehensive online encyclopedia of memes. This allowed us to analyse different social networks just by looking at the memes that appeared on them. What we found was very revealing (and, at times, disturbing).

Really nice chart with lines of influence and everything occurs here.

Measuring influence

However, looking at web communities in isolation only provides a limited view of the meme ecosystem. Communities influence each other and memes posted on one site are often reposted on another. To measure the interplay and influence of different web communities, we turned to statistical models called Hawkes processes, which let us say with confidence whether a particular event is caused by a previous event.
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We found that /pol/ was by far the most influential disseminator of memes, in terms of the raw number of images originating there. In particular, it was more influential in spreading racist and political memes. However, The_Donald subreddit is actually the most “efficient” at spreading these memes onto other fringe social networks as well as mainstream ones such as Twitter.

отлично!

Original Submission