Scientific Study Reveals the Most Popular Memes across the Internet

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Finally, some important scientific facts. Researchers from the University College London, Cyprus University of Technology, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and King's College London all teamed up to determine the dankest memes on the internet.

In a lengthy – and surreal – rigorous academic study which is available on arXiv, the team looked at how successful racist fringe groups on the web were at circulating their memes.

A detailed analysis of racist frog memes. arXiv

The team noted that entirely different groups including /pol/ and The_Donald on 4chan and Reddit etc. have been working hard to create new memes and make them go viral, to popularize their ideas within the general population.

"When measuring the influence each community has concerning disseminating memes to other Web communities, we found that /pol/ has the largest overall influence for racist and political memes, however, /pol/ was the least efficient, i.e., concerning influence w.r.t. the total number of memes posted, while The Donald is very successful in pushing memes to both fringe and mainstream Web communities," the team wrote.

During their study, which examined memes posted between July 2016 and July 2017, the researchers managed to identify the most popular memes on the web. They found that overall, Reddit and Twitter tended to post "fun" memes, while /pol/ mostly posted political and racist memes.

First, let's begin with the terrible end of the web: /pol/ are obsessed with variations of Pepe the frog. You will recognize him from profile pictures used by racists and all-round-horrible people all over the web.

Top memes on /pol/

1. Feels Bad Man

2. Smug Frog

3. Happy Merchant

4. Apu Apustaja

5. Pepe the Frog

6. Make America Great Again

7. Angry Pepe

8. Bait this is Bait

9. I Know that Feel Bro

10. Cult of Kek

On Reddit and Twitter, there was a more "fun" feel to the memes.

Top Reddit meme formats:

1. Manning Face

2. That’s the Joke

3. Sad Frog

4. Confession Bear

5. This is Fine

6. Smug Frog

(Another racist frog meme)

7. Roll Safe

8. Rage Guy

9. Make America Great Again

10. Fake CCG Card

Top Twitter memes:

1. Roll Safe

2. Arthur’s Fist

3. Evil Kermit

4. Nut Button

5. Spongebob Mock

6. Reaction Images

7. Expanding Brain

8. Demotivational Posters

9. Cash Me Ousside/Howbow Dah

10. Conceited Reaction

The researchers hope that their study could be used to assist social media colossi in identifying hateful content.

Reference: IFLScience