This Is Where Internet Memes Come From

Two Reddit and 4chan communities are especially good at spreading and “weaponizing” them

The word meme was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, in which he suggested that ideas could replicate, evolve, and enter popular culture in a process analogous to the way genes spread. Today, a meme is commonly thought of as a variant of an image based on a common theme that has spread widely on the internet. Memes are often humorous or ironic, but they are also vehicles for political messages, used to spread aggressive or racist messages and to incite hatred.

Several online communities focus on creating and spreading memes with the goal of making an idea become viral — a process known as “attention hacking” or “weaponizing.” These communities, on websites such as Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, and others, have become hugely influential.

And yet little is known about the way memes spread or how they exert their influence.

Today that changes, at least in part, thanks to the work of Gianluca Stringhini at University College London and a few colleagues, who have developed a way to measure the dissemination and propagation of memes across the web for the first time. Using this technique, the team has measured the way…