On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities

Abstract

Internet memes are increasingly used to sway and manipulate public opinion. This prompts the need to study their propagation, evolution, and influence across the Web. In this paper, we detect and measure the propagation of memes across multiple Web communities, using a processing pipeline based on perceptual hashing and clustering techniques, and a dataset of 160M images from 2.6B posts gathered from Twitter, Reddit, 4chan's Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab, over the course of 13 months. We group the images posted on fringe Web communities (/pol/, Gab, and The Donald subreddit) into clusters, annotate them using meme metadata obtained from Know Your Meme, and also map images from mainstream communities (Twitter and Reddit) to the clusters.Our analysis provides an assessment of the popularity and diversity of memes in the context of each community, showing, e.g., that racist memes are extremely common in fringe Web communities. We also find a substantial number of politicsrelated memes on both mainstream and fringe Web communities, supporting media reports that memes might be used to enhance or harm politicians. Finally, we use Hawkes processes to model the interplay between Web communities and quantify their reciprocal influence, finding that /pol/ substantially influences the meme ecosystem with the number of memes it produces, while The Donald has a higher success rate in pushing them to other communities.

Spread of Hate Speech in Online Social Media

“…(de Lima et al 2018) also found that Gab is very politically oriented and users who abuse the lack of moderation disseminate hate. (Zannettou et al 2018b) perform a large scale measurement study of the meme ecosystem by introducing a novel image processing pipeline. Gab has substantially higher number of posts with racist memes.…”

The Anatomy of Reddit: An Overview of Academic Research

“…Other. Zannettou et al [53] perform a study of meme evolution and propagation across different platforms, e.g. Twitter, Reddit, 4chan and Gab, where the last two are image boards structurally similar to Reddit.…”

Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube

“…Across the globe, individuals are skeptical of traditional media vehicles and growingly consume news and opinion content on social media [22,31]. In this setting, recent research has shown that fringe websites (like 4chan) and subreddits (like /r/TheDonald) have great influence over which memes [44] and news [45] are shared in large social networks, such as Twitter. YouTube is extremely popular, especially among children and teenagers [7], and, if the streaming website is actually radicalizing individuals, this can push fringe ideologies like white supremacy further into the mainstream [42].…”