Comment on COVID-19 conspiracy theories thrive on social media platforms *except* Twitter. While engagement with Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp and Messenger were all associated with an increase in expressed conspiracy beliefs, engagement with Twitter was associated with a reduction in conspiracy beliefs.

This fits with previous research that shows memes are the core of conspiracy theories these days. Image memes are much harder to share privately within groups on twitter.

Edit:

Some research to read.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.547065/full

This considers memes an evolution of the leaflet and explaina how they can effectively spread information across borders.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750481319835639?journalCode=dcma can't find the full one but it covers how memes are weaponised.

https://www.cogitatiopress.com/mediaandcommunication/article/view/3533 this is about "meme wars" on Instagram.

https://www.axios.com/memes-misinformation-coronavirus-56-2c3e88be-237e-49c1-ab9d-e5cf4d2283ff.html

This actually goes into detail as to why memes have advantages over text, so it may be that because twitter is more text based, their ai systems are better equipped to stop meme spread.

Could also be that twitter are just more willing to challenge misinformation memes because their revenue is much less tied up in profiting from right wing users.

Who'd have thought memes would get us here?

Hideo Kojima with MGS2 twenty years ago

Edit: for anyone curious I’ve added some YouTube links that explore this aspect of the game.

!Super Bunnyhop has an excellent video on MGS2, I’ve timestamped it so it should take you right to the section on memes and the spread of “junk data”: Critical Close-up: Metal Gear Solid 2. Alternatively, these two videos by LogosSteve let you hear the full conversation with the AIs: The Most Profound Moment in Gaming: MGS2 Al Conversation Analysis Part 1 of 2 and The Most Profound Moment in Gaming: MGS2 Al Conversation Analysis Part 2 of 2!<

Yep. Kojima unironically predicted this decades ago.

Do you have a link to anything explaining what you mean? This is the first I’ve heard of this

In MGS2, there's an entire conversations about how the nature of war has changed in the digital age, including lines such as: "In this digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness"; and "the digital society furthers human flaws, and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths."

Funnily enough I've seen the theme of MGS2 summed up as "meme"- meaning the original definition, not just like image macros- as in how ideas are passed from generation to generation and how that is affected by a more digital world.

It definitely is. MGS1 is "GENE" (your heritage doesn't define you), MGS2 is "MEME" (your story doesn't define you), and MGS3 is "SCENE" (your nationality doesn't define you). Those summaries are pretty general, but it's more or less what they are.

ETA: Also, MGS4 didn't keep up the rhyming theme structure and decided upon "SENSE", or "WILL". Which bums me out.

It’s a natural evolution (so to speak) to the thesis of the first game, which was “gene”.

Absolutely right. There are other themes too (arguably more important to the overall plot is nuclear proliferation) but summarised in a word while MGS1 is about “genes”, MGS2 is about “memes”.

Stupid question but what is MGS?

Why they deleted that comment, they should post the scene, it's super accurate.

Huh, looks like it was removed but I didn’t get a message about it. I actually went back and edited it to include a link to the scene and discussion…

Edit: should be visible again now thanks to the kind mods.

I feel like historical political cartoons are somewhat similar to memes despite not being known as such. Really not crazy to think memes have largely taken the place of political cartoons.

Memes are the result, not the cause. The cause is lack of education and people simply hating to read and go beyond cursory understanding. Same reason we have so many google researchers these days.

Facts take a lot more reading to understand the basis behind, with some having decades, if not centuries of science behind them to fully comprehend. Confirming someone's preconceived bias through funny pictures is much easier.

Memes are the result, not the cause. The cause is lack of education and people simply hating to read and go beyond cursory understanding.

I agree with most of what you're saying but I'm not sure about the assessment of result vs cause.

First, if we're seeking the cause of 'conspiracy theories these days' I think you could argue memes are a cause because we're looking at a delta. E.g. People have a relatively consistent level if not increasing education, memes are a new tool that caused the change.

Second, wouldn't lack of education [...] be a result of something else and still not a root cause?

Not to mention that historically speaking "the world" has never been more educated. We've never had higher literacy rates or better access to information etc.

at the same time, we've never had a higher level of misinformation and literary junk. literacy and reading comprehension are still two very distant subjects

Type of education is relevant. Are we increasing the amount of critical thinking that is learned? Or are we just exposing people to more and more information that they completely lack the tools to evaluate? The rise in standardized testing in the US has certainly lead to more rote memorization and less actual engagement with concepts, and I've seen the same thing in Canada, but I can't speak to the rest of the world.

US actually has a lower focus on rote memorization than some places, particularly at the university level.

You both make fair points. I just know an increasing number of people these days who CAN read but dont WANT to read. They all want a summation or cliff notes version of everything and would rather read 3 sentences in a google search to confirm their biases rather than understanding the intricacies of any subject.

I think that goes for literally everyone. There aren't enough hours in a lifetime to understand even a tiny fraction of what there is readily available to study. Most people just "get the idea" and base their worldview on what they can deduce from that. The issue is a lack of self awareness in people who don't realize they only have a surface-level understanding of whatever is in the discourse that day.

I only understand epidemiology from casual Google searches and use that information to better understand the pandemic, but my confidence stems from the fact that I'm mostly just repeating experts who I have faith really do know what they're talking about. But only someone consumed by arrogance would try to argue with those experts while having a similar or lesser understanding of the topic than I do.

Memes are the result, not the cause. The cause is lack of education

That can't be right. I would say there is something different between the present moment, and the moment 20 years ago (which had its own issues). Whatever the cause of that difference is, it should be something that changed between 20 years ago and now. Education hasn't gotten any worse in the past 20 years (if anything, it's gotten better). However, memes are a new thing that didn't exist 20 years ago. So there's a case that memes are the cause, but not a very good case that lack of education is the cause.

Maybe if we had even stronger education than we currently do, people wouldn't be fertile ground for memes to shape them in this way. But when we want to know the cause for why the present is different from the past, memes are a better candidate than education.

Unless you can identify some point in time where education was better than it currently is, and we didn't have the current set of problems.

Yeah, its probably just my own experiences jading my perspective. People just seem dumber than ever at this particular point in time. And while people may be book smarter and more literate, that doesnt mean they will read or can solve problems using critical thinking. You can have all the book smarts in the world with no idea how to actually apply them to real life.

I assure you that humans today are innately just as smart as humans of any other period, and their education is as good or better. Whatever has changed is an external change in the social environment. We've got people who learned a little bit of critical thinking, and now apply it to anything they disagree with, and who get enough information from social media that there's always something they agree with to replace whatever thing they discredit that they disagree with.

i feel like theyre both. Things/people can be 'memed on' or you can create memes based on certain things but then people take it unironically.

Everything is memetics. Memetics got us everywhere.

You've got good memeage.

MGS2 back in 2001 touched upon this / kind of called it. Shadow government in MGS2 believed that controlling the flow of digital information was important both to maintaining their control, but also was necessary to stop people from drowning themselves in cesspool of trite information.

Link to a summary of the Shadow government's plan.

I'd like to know more about this research. Can you provide any links?

I sure can!

Ill edit my post so everyone can see.

Thanks for the extra effort, sharing sources is always appreciated!

Thanks for doing that! This is fascinating. Terrifying, but fascinating.

Thank you for these!

I believe I have a couple memes that cover this topic, I’ll let you know when I find them

This makes sense when you consider the landscape leading up to the 2016 elections—remember the meme wars?

100%. I had a period not long before then where memes were absolutely informing and modifying my opinions. Get someone to laugh and they let down their guard. Keep them laughing with similar content and eventually they're laughing at the target of the joke, seeking out communities with similar humor, reading funny comments with the same message, and eventually participating themselves

That sort of fits with MTG bring blown up memes to congress. Her world view is based on fb memes, to the point she can only explain her thoughts through memes.

In the future, all communication will be through memes and gifs.

Shaka, when the walls fell!

Temba, his arms wide.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered!

Communication has always been all memes, it's just that when the memes are sufficiently old we call them "expressions" and then eventually "words"

The only thing that's new is that we've gotten a lot more efficient at creating and spreading new memes.

I'll never not read her name as Magic: the Gathering and I will always be confused why my favorite game is in Congress.

So sharing memes created using evidence based facts can help combat?

For something to be memetic, it has to have some quality that makes people want to share it; e.g it should be funny. Facts aren’t nearly as funny and/or ridiculous as the misinformation being put out.

Which is why all of the pro-vax memes are generally aimed at mocking anti-vaxxers rather than providing actual information. Then again, if you're getting your news from memes, the system has already failed you.

I think this is why anti-vaxxers HATE r/hermancainaward. It turns that on its head. Suddenly the people posting the snarky memes became the ultimate butt of the joke.

HCA throws the spotlight on the stupidity of the people who want to deny the reality of a global health problem and exacerbate it. For many of us who lost loved ones to these idiots and their shabby propaganda, it’s a reminder of how easily people fall into that rabbit hole of denial.

I don’t sympathize with people who devote their time to sharing hateful, anti-science nonsense then request for their idiocy to be politely forgotten when the harm they gladly shared with others comes back to bite their own ass.

It's not mocking dead people, it's mocking anti-vaxxers who just happened to die from their own ass-backwards beliefs.

I’d imagine people dislike that subreddit due to it celebrating other people dying. Or at least that requires fewer assumptions than disliking something due to which direction a joke is going.

Are cautionary tales not useful to humans? Pretty much every single case shows what skepticism or outright hostility to science can lead to.

Cautionary tales to whom though? Everyone on the sub is probably already vaccinated

The comments on posts were considerably less charitable before the admins gave them a warning. They still tend to act smug about people dying.

If we’re being scientifically honest, the people celebrating memes of people refusing to wear masks or refuse to get vaccinated are celebrating other people dying. They don’t see it that way, which is the whole problem, but that’s what it is.

Is that being scientifically honest? It feels more like taking something true and then twisting it a bit.

I view these similarly to someone posting a meme mocking a fat person dying from heart disease, and a meme celebrating eating some crazy unhealthy triple steak burger thing.

being fat is not contagious and you can't stop it by going to walgreens twice

Not the point my comment was making.

I didn’t suggest that being fat is worse than or even close to spreading covid.

I’m saying it’s not scientifically honest to say memes in favor of not getting a vaccine or not wearing masks is celebrating people dying.

Just to be clear, you are asking for a peer reviewed study that show vaccines decrease mortality from Covid, correct?

I wonder how a r/ that made fun of vaccinated people who died from "unrelated issues" after taking the vax would do on reddit.

Something tells me it would be banned rather quickly.

Something tells me it would be banned rather quickly.

Considering there are multiple currently in existence, you'd be wrong.

Real world data says such a sub would have a lot less content.

Nah, it exists already.

That’s called Facebook and they don’t bother using actual real data, hence the memes.

Then again, if you're getting your news from memes, the system has already failed you.

I don't know how to fix the system but making scientifically accurate and informative memes sounds like a plausible way to combat the misinformation

Sure, you can make whatever meme you want. Will anyone care about it? Probably not.

It is not an intuitional take.

I don’t see how, let’s say, a meme about vaccine being bad is inherently more funny than a meme about vaccine not being bad.

Laughing at a fraudulent stat piece is weird.

And if we are talking about ridiculous ridiculous, nobody would stop believing in effectiveness of smallpox vaccine due to “it will turn you into a cow” meme.

My take on the subject: those memes aren't actually funny to these people. The laugh and share comes as a social response to their bias being confirmed somewhere, not because they genuinely find the meme humorous in a vacuum. Regardless of how much they want you to believe they are nonchalant, practical thinkers, people who share memes of misinformation are dying for their next dosage of confirmation bias, and finding bad memes funny is solely about how the offending meme is central to their cause, rather than a genuinely good joke.

That might be true, but it doesn’t necessarily explain the supposed difference between proliferation of “good” and “bad” memes.

The same mechanism could work for the second side if we suppose it works for this one.

It could be that ultra-minority viewpoints, which most misinformation and conspiracy theories make themselves out to be when proliferating to their target audience, value the camaraderie and confirmation bias that the memes provide much more so than practical, majority viewpoints on the same subjects.

Never underestimate the capability of your fellow man to surprise you with new levels of stupidity.

If I sent grandma a news article, she would throw it away and not read it. If I sent grandma a joke, she would either laugh or say she doesn't get it. This is how a notion uses humor to reflect itself through culture where blatantly political ideas aren't able to pass as easily.

The problem presents itself in the fact that people think "popularity" means "authenticity". A false idea takes hold and can spread to millions of people with ease, especially when your government spends all its money on bullets instead of books for several decades.

"All I'm asking is where did all these cows come from!! Somebody, probably the feds or big pharma, has the answer!!!! but they are covering it up! But they call me insane, they call me insane for just asking questions!"

Scaaaary big pharma making money by saving billions of people and dollars

If you look at certain places on the internet (a place where awards granted in the name of Herman Cain, for one), you'll quickly see that the same exact memes are shared over, and over, and over, ad nauseum. In an album of 12-18 images, spanning the "mocking Covid via memes" stage to the final images where the subject is on their death bed or has died, you can effectively skip most of the images in the album because they are the exact same in every post.

In theory yes. In practice, you'll always be at disadvantage.

For example, a key component in this kind of message is that when you identify a problem, you need to find easy step that can be taken to avoid it. It has to have some immediate, if negligible effect and be possible to do by anyone.

To use Covid as example (in the past the textbook examples revolve around voting and civic engagement and desegregation in US), we have had a number of easy steps, but because Covid itself was often undermined by politicians looking for short term image, and because most of us didn't know better, as well due to survivor bias and lack of trust, the effects of steps like social distancing, masks etc were hard to estimate. We could take a look at countries that ignored it like Sweden and proportionally how many more deaths they've had, but you already need a very engaged person to do this, and it's hard to compare dofferent countries and offset how population density affects it.
If climate is warming, as can be seen on yearly basis, how come snow still exists?
How can you claim surgical masks help if they don't have 100% efficacy?

All this for something as simple as efficacy of surgical masks, and you can already see how much harder it is to tell the truth, as it will always be reality-checked vs just blatantly lying for teh lulz.

Add to it the absolute lack of earnesty online, and it's even worse. People make all kinds of snarky comments that they themselves could debunk. But as we've seen time and time again, those communications will then be taken as honest by other people, who will them share them with conviction of a zealot.

That' s the thing about memetics. If an idea can spread faster, it'll be more succesful. Being right only complicates rather than accomodate that.

If they're funny, yes. if not, they'll probably do more harm than good

Sort of, the issue is also that memes are very good at appealing to peoples biases.

I wonder if there's any research on the use of Memes to delegitimize the use of memes. I'm reminded of memes that make fun of people for getting their information from memes.

Have you read Snow Crash? There's a similar idea in the backstory of that, where an ancient language was used to mentally program/control people, & the Babel story came about from someone essentially making a linguistic meme/virus that destroyed people's ability to understand the common language.

First thing that comes to mind after reading your comment is Marjorie Taylor Greene sharing memes on the floor.

Right? It makes sense now. Its how they communciate.

Did she actually do that?

Nice papers from Zollo, Scala, Quattrociocchi are also dealing with these topics.

I would have thought that public groups would have made misinformation spread faster, not slower.

Memes are the dumbest things Im not sure why they’re so popular this helps thank you

Reminds me of how Trump's staff had to make him brightly-colored oversized flash cards with pictures because he would/could not read his briefings. Memes are just the digital equivalent of a brightly-colored flash card with pictures, and are reflective of a preference for "bumper sticker logic" among right-wingers.

This actually goes into detail as to why memes have advantages over text, so it may be that because twitter is more text based, their ai systems are better equipped to stop meme spread.

Given that Facebook is pretty accurate at describing images (if the image fails to load you have a bit of text at the top of the image box that describes what it is) I don't think this is really the case. Rather, as you say:

Could also be that twitter are just more willing to challenge misinformation memes because their revenue is much less tied up in profiting from right wing users.

Facebook intentionally uses misinformation to gaslight users. Facebook has been at the heart of political campaigning for the last 5 years. You can tell whatever lies you want when you target your ads to only those who will readily accept them.

I think it also explains why extremists and reactionaries have been particularly pissy about Twitter the last few months -- it's the worst platform for spreading propaganda.

My money would be on Reddit being the best you since can undetectably manipulate it with blank profiles and the staff do absolutely nothing to prevent it.

Yes, nothing like Twitter suppressing content it seems is a “conspiracy” - I’m sure that can’t go terribly wrong.

Thank you for those links <3 Good scientific articles is what I need now

This is an incredibly interesting comment that absolutely deserves its own post imo

Also: maybe their profit are less tied to right wing users because it's less hospitable to conspiracy theories

I am very premature in suggesting such a thing, but would sharing less memes mocking the stupid people (anti-science/research) actually help get the message across? Or would their propaganda reach educated masses faster?

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