![]() “It gave voices to people who weren’t part of the establishment. “A lot of people in those days really saw the internet as having real great potential for good,” Flann says. It would be 22 years before Google emerged as a simple search engine and nearly 30 years before a nascent Facebook was born in a Harvard dorm room. Although the idea of wireless communication and connected information networks was theorized for decades prior, the internet was clunky by today’s standards and node-to-node communication was limited. In the late 70s, the internet as we know it did not exist. “It was ahead of its time,” Flann says during a Zoom chat in February. “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain,” Dawkins wrote.įlann bought the book a year after it was published and still keeps it on his bookshelf. The origin of the modern meme was introduced in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who described mimemes as a new type of replicator in human culture in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes were not always powerful disruptors of democracy. “Imagine this is not just happening on election day, but every day,” Flann said. It’s just everybody is yelling.” – Nick Flann And that’s a good thing … It’s still there. It gave voices to people who weren’t part of the establishment. “A lot of people in those days really saw the internet as having real great potential for good. The goal: reduce turnout and swing the election to another candidate. He described a potential scenario where a bad actor targets likely supporters of a political candidate on social media with a meme containing false information about their polling station. “It has tremendous power to influence the future,” Flann said. Disinformation delivered via memes becomes more sinister when we start changing our behavior. Memes can be jokes that emerge and evolve organically by social media users or they can be architected using AI techniques to trick people into trusting the information and sharing it across their networks. Viruses don’t have an agenda beyond evolving to survive internet memes, on the other hand, do. ![]() ![]() The difference between biological viruses and internet memes is intent. Viruses infiltrate a host’s cells to make its body work for them. Memes thrive in the world because we have the internet and because we have advanced artificial intelligence (AI).” “It’s not just fun, it can actually change your behavior and some of the outcomes of society, perhaps. “They spread and influence humans,” Flann said. In September, Utah State University computer science professor Nick Flann gave a Science Unwrapped talk titled “Meme Menace: How Disinformation Spreads on Social Media,” comparing internet memes to biological viruses that infect a host’s mind and replicate via the share button. When the latter occurs online, it exploits human fallibilities and can spread disinformation like wildfire. They can be a benign source of entertainment or engineered to promote information that is false. A meme, for the uninitiated, is not just a cat joke on the internet.Ī meme is an idea or behavior that spreads and evolves as people interact with them, often through the internet.
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