HateMemes are taking the alt-right’s message of hate mainstream

By Emiliano De Cristofaro

Published 13 December 2018

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.

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.

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 analyze different social networks just by looking at the memes that appeared on them. What we found was very revealing (and, at times, disturbing).