Memes and disinformation are intimately related, and I believe the information age changed the dominant paradigm for memes from positive to controversial. Here's how and why that's important.
There’s plenty of talk about disinformation, especially in the US, and this week I want to tackle the subject and give my theory as to why I believe disinformation is more common now than ever. To understand why the information age brough so much disinformation we need to start by looking at memes. The word ’meme’ is mostly associated with jokes on the internet, but the original meaning refers to units of culture behaving like genes. That’s not an especially helpful definition, so I’ll provide a few examples and a more detailed explanation later on. First up though, I want to make clear that memes predate the internet, in fact memes have always been around. The reason why memes are more relevant to disinformation now than it has been historically is mainly due to how the internet has enabled information to spread in new ways.
A meme is a unit of culture which spreads from person to person and can be anything from an idea or a symbol to a factoid or a joke. Take for example the story that people on average swallow eight spiders per year. I’d wager most have come across the story despite it being false, and according to rumour a deliberate falsehood to demonstrate how gullible people are. This is one of the key things to understand about memes; they’re pieces of culture which are governed by a survival of the most spreadable and just like genes memes mutate over time with the versions most likely to spread surviving. Memes need to be worth spreading but they do not need to convey truth to survive.
The ‘eight spiders’ example is rather banal so let’s look at some more interesting memes. The idea that Britain pays the European Union (EU) £350 million per week is a good example of a political meme. The meme spread during the campaign leading up to the Brexit referendum and it’s obvious why, especially when paired with the phrase “let’s fund our [national health service] instead”. Memes are cultural units though, and cultural meaning and resonance is informed by the parties which create, distribute, and consume any given piece of culture. The £350 million meme is a symbol for how the EU is keeping Britain down for leavers and a symbol for how the leave campaign lied during the referendum to remainers. In the analogy that memes behave like genes except for culture then the goal of a meme is to be spread, and by being positive to some and negative to some memes can spread further in an information system where people routinely engages with strangers. I’ll call memes which have positive connotations to some and negative connotations to others ‘controversial memes’ and as we’ll see I believe they’ve become more common during the 10’s.
It’s no surprise then that memes can cause political and social polarisation, especially given how information is shared in the information age. Memes have always been around but before the 2010’s the information infrastructure needed for memes to spread globally didn’t exist. I believe the primary reason why memes can spread incredibly fast and incredibly far is the incentive structures inherent in our social media. The goal of a post on social media is for others to see it, and success is measured in likes, retweets, views, and comments. On platforms like youtube, twitter and tiktok where I believe most people tend to follow at least a few people who they have never met or engaged with except through the platform creating and spreading controversial memes is a good strategy to get likes, views, and comments. If you spread controversial memes at a family dinner you risk creating an uncomfortable situation, and you will see those people again which makes it more costly to spread controversial memes. For this reason I believe that prior to the information age it was easier for memes with purely positive connotations (at least to the audience present at the time of spreading) to spread. As discussions move online and started to increasingly involve people we have no previous relationship to the personal costs are reduced, and controversial memes become not only less awkward to spread, one can be rewarded to do so. For example, on twitter if people disagree with you they might still retweet you with an angry comment, and a retweet is a retweet irrespective of whether or not the retweeter agrees with you. I believe one of the crucial changes the information age brought was the change in dominant strategy for memes changing from being positive to controversial.
Memes often come about spontaneously and by coincidence, but sometimes they are deliberately made like President Trump’s 2016 slogan “make America great again”. Engineering memes to cause discord was historically difficult for several reasons, most of which have since disappeared. For one, spreading memes through traditional media requires time, money, and luck whereas spreading memes through social media requires only patience and luck. Secondly, as previously mentioned the rise of controversial memes makes memetic engineering far more useful as an offensive tool. As the Russians showed in 2016, the key to a disinformation campaign is to create a lot of controversial memes until some start to go viral. This strategy is available to everyone with an internet connection and I can’t see a way to prevent it without totally altering the way our current social media work. As long as our social medias encourage controversial memes disinformation will be prevalent.
Is there anything we can do about this? Well, I think we should try to create social media which encourages positive memes by being less anonymous, and by creating algorithms which promotes good news instead of bad news. That’s easier said than done, but we won’t be able to avoid disinformation if our information systems incentivise controversial memes.
If you found this post interesting please share it with a friend or coworker and come back next week for another one, if you want to read more you can last week's post about economics here, and you can read all my posts about politics here.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover Photo by Tracy Le Blanc from Pexels
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