The Rules of Contagion

In the past decade or so, a handful of online communities have
been particularly successful at getting their messages picked up. One
early example emerged in September 2008, when a user posted on
the Oprah Winfrey Show’s online message board. The user claimed
to represent a massive paedophile network, with over 9,000
members. But the post wasn’t quite what it seemed: the phrase ‘over
9,000’ – a reference to a fighter shouting about their opponent’s
power level in the cartoon Dragon Ball Z – was actually a meme from
4chan, an anonymous online message board popular with trolls. To
the delight of 4chan users, Winfrey took the paedophilia claim
seriously and read out the phrase on air.[111]
Online forums like 4chan – and others such as Reddit and Gab –
in effect act as incubators for contagious memes. When users post
images and slogans, it can spark large numbers of new variants.
These newly mutated memes spread and compete on the forums,
with the most contagious ones surviving and the weaker ones
disappearing. It’s a case of ‘survival of the fittest’, the same sort of
process that occurs in biological evolution.[112] Although it isn’t
anything like the millennia-long timescales that pathogens have had,
this crowd-sourced evolution can still give online content a major
advantage.
One of the most successful evolutionary tricks honed by trolls has
been to make memes absurd or extreme, so it’s unclear whether they
are serious or not. This veneer of irony can help unpleasant views
spread further than they would otherwise. If users take offence, the
creator of the meme can claim it was a joke; if users assume it was a
joke, the meme goes uncriticised. White supremacist groups have
also adopted this tactic. A leaked style guide for the Daily Stormer
website advised its writers to keep things light to avoid putting off
readers: ‘generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as
half-joking.’[113]
As memes rise in prominence, they can become an effective
resource for media-savvy politicians. In October 2018, Donald Trump
adopted the slogan ‘Jobs Not Mobs’, claiming that Republicans
favoured the economy over immigration. When journalists traced the
idea to its source, they found that the meme had probably originated