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

Fringe social networks like /pol/ and Gab share hateful and racist memes at an impressive rate, producing countless variants of antisemitic and pro-Nazi memes such as the Happy Merchant caricature of a “greedy” Jewish man with a large nose, or those including some version of Adolf Hitler in another image. Memes like Pepe the Frog (and its variants) are often used in conjunction with other memes to incite hate or influence public opinion on world events, such as Brexit or the advance of Islamic State.

Also, fringe web communities have the power to twist the meaning of specific memes, change their target context, and make them go viral on mainstream communities. A perfect example is the NPC Wojak meme, which refers to non-playable characters in video games that are controlled by computers. In September 2018, 4chan and Reddit users began creating fictional accounts, mocking liberals by referring to them as NPCs, meaning people with no critical thinking, bound by unchangeable programming, and manipulated by others.

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.

This lets us determine, for example, whether someone posting a meme on 4chan results in the same meme being posted on Twitter. In this way we were able to model how the more niche platforms were influencing the mainstream ones and the wider web.

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.

Looking ahead
Negative or hateful memes generated by fringe communities have become a tool of political and ideological propaganda. Shedding light on their origins, spread and influence provides us with a better understanding of the dangers they pose. As such, we hope that making our data and methods publicly available will allow more researchers to monitor how weaponized memes might influence elections and broader political debate.

For example, we worked with Facebook to help the social network’s efforts to mitigate manipulation campaigns during the 2018 US midterm elections, providing them with real-time examples of politically-motivated memes that originated from fringe communities. This allowed them to gain a better understanding of dangerous memes and monitor their spread through the platform in politically relevant contexts. Overall, this line of work can help mainstream social networks identify hateful content, for example by improving automatic detection of hateful variants of popular memes, and hopefully remove it.

Emiliano De Cristofaro is Associate professor at UCL. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.