What are memes — and how do they get kids in trouble?

Show Caption Hide Caption Harvard rescinds admission for at least 10 students for vulgar memes Harvard revoked admissions for at least ten students after discovering they exchanged inappropriate memes in a Facebook chat. Elizabeth Keatinge (@elizkeatinge) has more.

SAN FRANCISCO — Memes are in the news because ten incoming Harvard freshmen had their acceptance revoked due to their posting of violent, racist and sexist memes on an offshoot of the Harvard-created Class of 2021 Facebook group.

These visual jokes have become ubiquitous online. For many young people who grew up consuming media from the internet more than cable TV or newspapers, understanding, sharing and creating memes is second nature. Memes are used to satirize politics, popular culture and common experiences and are popular on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and Tumblr.

Popular memes recently have included President Trump and Arab leaders with their hands on a glowing orb, a series of on former President Obama and ex-Vice President Biden leaving the White House and many, many memes involving cats.

Immediately after this moment, Trump started speaking the Black Speech #cofveve.

One Orb to rule them all ... pic.twitter.com/v4SMs6v68t — Ada Katia (@LotrAddicted) May 31, 2017

Obama: I know Joe called and ordered 500 pizzas to be delivered on January 21st, but I need you to cancel that order. pic.twitter.com/nshGacLpKV — Barack Biden (@ObamaBidenConvo) November 19, 2016

Sorry to be all political but I'm really annoyed. Here's a cat meme. pic.twitter.com/MBOFcUMKpn — Farah Chaudry (@farahchaudry) May 30, 2017

Youth-centric memes are concentrated in public groups — like those related to specific colleges — or even in private chats. That's where the would-be Harvard students went wrong. According to The Harvard Crimson, the meme group started off as part of the Harvard Class of 2021 Facebook group, calling itself "Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens." Then some members of that group started a private "dark" group message where more offensive memes were shared, including those making fun of sexual assault and joking about minority groups, the Holocaust and child abuse, according to online college-oriented news site, The Tab.

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Origins

Memes are often innocuous, used for banter and as an in-the-know way to communicate and feel part of a group. While they've been embraced for a harmless inanity (the kind of cat jokes your aunt might send to her choir list), they also often veered into the harmful and violent.

The term was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his best-selling 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It described an idea, behavior or style that spread virally between humans within a culture. An infectious idea, Dawkins said, could leap from mind to mind much like a virus leaps from person to person.

Examples of memes are monotheism, the idea that the earth revolves around the sun or that diseases are caused by microbes and not evil spirits. These viral ideas spread from human to human and influenced culture, just as genes spread from human to human and affected the species, Dawkins wrote.

The concept of memes was embraced by thinkers and writers. By 1988 writer Howard Rheingold released a series of essays titled Excursions to the far side of the mind: A book of memes.

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By 1994, online observer and lawyer Mike Godwinwrote in Wired magazine about the ways the Internet was especially conducive to spreading these viral ideas. Godwin famously created one of earliest viral Internet memes, Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, which states "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Beginning in the early 2000s one of the meme formats that has become most iconic – a picture with a line of text at the top and the bottom, in a font called Impact – first emerged.

The first memes became popular in the Internet’s unabashedly offensive troll culture, said Whitney Phillips, a professor of digital folklore at Mercer University in Georgia who studies memes.

Racist, sexist and violent memes in the new format found a potent breeding ground on 4chan, a web discussion board that included a large array of offensive material.

The format, minus the offensive content, made the leap into popular culture beginning around 2009, much to the anger of the trolls who had created it.

“There was quite a lot of resentment that their highly esoteric, highly offensive and highly specific form had become this thing your uncle does on Facebook,” said Phillips. She and co-author Ryan Milner have a book coming out next week on memes and online expression called The Ambivalent Internet.

While many memes shared online are light-hearted, they can also involve inappropriate and often taboo subjects. In this way, they are much like off-color jokes that might have been told after a quick look around to see who was within earshot. Only now they're posted online in forums.

This gives the illusion that they're private "but of course, nothing is private online,” said Rheingold. "Isn’t it amazing that they were smart enough to get into Harvard and not smart enough to know this?" he asked.