Originally published 2018-07-07.
Photo: antonioguillem/Shutterstock
Which memes travel furthest online, and who starts them? In 2018 a team of computer scientists from University College London, the Cyprus University of Technology, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and other institutions published one of the largest studies of the question. Analysing about 160 million images from 2.6 billion posts made between July 2016 and July 2017, they found that racist and political memes dominated fringe communities such as 4chan's /pol/ board, while Reddit and Twitter shared mostly light-hearted formats. The most striking result concerned influence: /pol/ pumped out the most memes, but the pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald was the most effective at pushing them into mainstream sites.
The opening picture is itself a good example of how a meme is born. It began as a 2015 stock photograph by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem and became the "Distracted Boyfriend" format in 2017, with labels pasted over each person, here joking that scientists chose meme research over a cure for cancer. Below you will find what the researchers measured, the top formats they reported for each platform with a short note on each, and what the study tells us about how ideas, including hateful ones, spread online.
What the researchers studied
The paper, "On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities", was led by Savvas Zannettou and co-authored by Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. A shorter version was presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in 2018, and the full version is free on arXiv.
The team collected images from four communities: Twitter, Reddit, 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" board (/pol/) and the social network Gab, treating The_Donald subreddit as a fringe community alongside /pol/ and Gab. They used perceptual hashing, a technique that gives near-identical pictures similar digital fingerprints, to group variations of the same image into clusters. Each cluster was then matched to entries on Know Your Meme, a community-written encyclopedia of internet culture. Finally, a statistical model called a Hawkes process estimated how often a meme posted in one community triggered posts of the same meme elsewhere.
A map of meme clusters from /pol/, The_Donald and Gab. Zannettou et al., arXiv
This figure from the paper shows the result of that clustering: each coloured group is a family of related images, with an example thumbnail for some of the best-known clusters. Visualising the data this way let the authors see which meme families sit close together and which communities share them.
The fringe: /pol/, The_Donald and Gab
According to IFLScience's summary of the study data, the top memes on /pol/ in the study period were, in order: Feels Bad Man, Smug Frog, Happy Merchant, Apu Apustaja, Pepe the Frog, Make America Great Again, Angry Pepe, Bait This Is Bait, I Know That Feel Bro and Cult of Kek. Several are variants of Pepe the Frog. Happy Merchant, which the authors describe plainly as an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish man, appeared in more distinct clusters on /pol/ than any other meme, and it also ranked among the top memes on Gab. We do not reproduce it here.
The influence analysis produced the paper's most quoted finding. /pol/ had the largest overall influence on the spread of racist and political memes simply because it produced so many. Measured per meme posted, however, it was the least efficient, while The_Donald was much more successful at getting its images adopted by both fringe and mainstream platforms. In practical terms, a small, highly coordinated community can matter more than its size suggests.
Top meme formats on Reddit
Reddit's list, as reported by IFLScience from the study's data, looks very different: mostly reaction images and joke formats, with a few political items mixed in.
1. Manning Face
A close-up of a man pulling a black balaclava over his face, catalogued on Know Your Meme as "Manning Face". It is usually paired with a short caption, as here, to express wanting to escape an awkward or uncomfortable situation.
2. That's the Joke
A frame from The Simpsons in which a performer on stage explains his own punchline. Users post it in reply to someone who has missed obvious sarcasm, making it one of the most reusable reaction images on the site.
3. Sad Frog
This is the melancholy version of Pepe the Frog, the character cartoonist Matt Furie created in his 2005 comic Boy's Club. On Reddit it was mostly used as a harmless way to say "that feels bad", which shows how the same character can carry very different meanings in different communities.
4. Confession Bear
An "advice animal" format in which a bear resting its head on a log introduces an embarrassing or unpopular personal admission. This example mixes it with the broken English of the Doge meme for a self-mocking joke.
5. This Is Fine
Cartoonist KC Green drew the dog calmly drinking coffee in a burning room for his webcomic Gunshow in 2013. It has since become the internet's standard image for pretending everything is under control, from workplace chaos to politics.
6. Smug Frog
Another Pepe variant, showing the frog with a self-satisfied grin. It appeared on both the fringe and mainstream lists, which illustrates the study's point that the same images move back and forth between communities with very different intentions.
7. Roll Safe
The man tapping his temple is British actor Kayode Ewumi as the character Reece Simpson, or "Roll Safe", in his 2016 web series #HoodDocumentary. In 2017 the screenshot became shorthand for terrible logic presented as clever advice, as in this caption.
8. Rage Guy
One of the original "rage comic" faces, which spread from 4chan around 2008. The screaming face and stretched-out "FFFFUUUU" were used at the end of comic strips about everyday frustrations and gave a whole subreddit its name.
9. Make America Great Again
Donald Trump's 2016 campaign slogan, which Ronald Reagan had used in a similar form in 1980, generated a vast family of images. This example is a typical over-the-top parody poster; such images were posted both sincerely and mockingly, which is part of what made them spread.
10. Fake CCG Card
Fake collectible card game (CCG) cards copy the look of games such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and give a real person or object absurd powers. This one turns Russian president Vladimir Putin into a "Divine-Beast" card with an energy-politics joke as its special ability.
Top meme formats on Twitter
Twitter's top ten leaned heavily on reaction images: screenshots that work as a facial expression or a punchline beneath a short line of text.
1. Roll Safe
Kayode Ewumi's temple tap topped the Twitter list as well, here paired with a cynical piece of relationship "wisdom". Its appearance at the top of both mainstream lists shows how quickly a format can cross platforms.
2. Arthur's Fist
A clenched yellow fist from the children's cartoon Arthur became the go-to image for barely suppressed anger in 2016. This example attaches it to a joke about the border wall Trump promised Mexico would pay for.
3. Evil Kermit
Kermit the Frog facing a hooded, darker double of himself, taken from the 2014 film Muppets Most Wanted. The format, which spread in late 2016, stands for the inner voice that tempts us toward bad decisions.
4. Nut Button
A photo of a hand slamming a large blue button labelled with a crude slang word, used to signal a reaction that simply cannot be held back. The example that ranked on Twitter pairs it with a sexual set-up and a biology-class punchline about mitochondria.
5. Mocking SpongeBob
A still of SpongeBob SquarePants acting like a chicken, paired with text in alternating capitals to mimic a mocking tone. It took off in May 2017, and this example uses it in a debate about health care.
6. Reaction Images
Know Your Meme groups thousands of photos of famous faces under this broad label. Here a grinning celebrity photograph stands in for putting on a brave face after a breakup.
7. Expanding Brain
Panels of an increasingly glowing brain rank ideas from ordinary to "enlightened", with the joke that the last ideas are the most absurd. This short version praises calling a garage a "car hole". The format became popular in 2017.
8. Demotivational Posters
Parodies of the inspirational office posters of the 1990s, in a black frame with a large title and a gloomy one-line moral. The style was popularised by the company Despair, Inc. and later copied endlessly online.
9. Cash Me Ousside / Howbow Dah
The catchphrase comes from a September 2016 episode of the television show Dr. Phil featuring teenager Danielle Bregoli, who later became the rapper Bhad Bhabie. Within months it had spread into remixes, merchandise and countless captions like this one.
10. Conceited Reaction
A puckered, side-eyed expression from battle rapper Conceited on the MTV show Wild 'N Out. It is used to show mock suspicion or disbelief, here at a shipping charge that arrives after a big online shopping spree.
How Pepe became a hate symbol
The study helps explain a story that had played out in public a year earlier. Pepe the Frog began as an easy-going character in Matt Furie's comic and spread online in the late 2000s as a mostly innocent reaction image. During the 2016 US election, white supremacists and the "alt-right" adopted him widely. In September 2016 the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its online database of hate symbols, while stressing that most uses of the frog are not bigoted and that context decides the meaning.
Furie objected to his character's new associations, worked with the ADL on a #SavePepe campaign that October, and in May 2017 symbolically killed Pepe off in a one-page strip showing the frog in an open casket. The meme carried on regardless. That is exactly the dynamic the researchers measured: once an image is loose online, its creator has little control over what it comes to mean.
What the study means, and its limits
The authors hoped their method could help platforms spot hateful imagery and track coordinated campaigns as they spread from small communities to large ones. Large platforms already use image-matching techniques of this kind for some harmful content, although moderation of memes remains difficult because the same picture can be a joke in one post and a slur in another.
The paper is also clear about what it could not do. It covered only static images, not videos or animated GIFs, and left out platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr. A large share of images could not be clustered at all, and the labels depend on Know Your Meme, which is written by volunteers. The rankings describe one year and a handful of sites, not the whole internet for all time. Even so, the core lesson has aged well: the memes we laugh at on mainstream sites often share family trees with images designed in much darker corners of the web, and knowing where a picture comes from is worth a moment's thought before sharing it.
Sources: Zannettou et al., On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities (arXiv, 2018); full text on ar5iv; IFLScience, James Felton (June 7, 2018); CNBC: Who is Pepe the Frog and why has he become a hate symbol? (2016); NBC News: Pepe the Frog creator kills off meme (2017); opening photo by Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock.
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