Let’s talk about Fake News.

Scratch that, because the term “Fake News” wasn’t even in people’s memetic vocabulary until after Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election of 2016. Let’s talk about “The Great Meme War of 2016.”

From Wikipedia:

A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[4]

From this point on, when I refer to “Memes” I will be using the definition above, not the millennial definition of photos with text, like Success Kid and Bad Luck Brian, though these do have an important role of which I will touch on later. Memes are essentially contagious information and ideas transferred from person to person.

Today’s internet is a vast network of information sharing between humans across the globe. Each website has a structure in which information can be shared, and that structure poses a unique environment in which a meme develops. There are certain characteristics that a meme must have to allow it to reproduce and live.

There are specific sites, particularly websites deemed “Social Media” that are particularly good at creating Memes - Fostering idea generation and allowing the evolution and replication of that idea from human to human. I refer to these websites as Meme Engines as they are responsible for a large output of ideas, information, and trends. While any website that shares information is technically creating a meme, I only use the term Meme Engine to refer to the superpowers such as Facebook, Twitter, Mainstream News Sites, etc.. A Meme Engine creates a meme by running information through its filter system. Each social media platform and each way of transferring information from human to human has a unique structure and therefor creates memes in a unique way. Just like in evolution, a social media platform will output memes best suited to replicate and survive in the environment in which it was created.

Acoustic conversation was the original way memes survived. They replicated through conversation and dialogue from person to person. I will use the term Acoustic Memes to refer to a meme that has formed, survived, and/or replicated via non-digital communications. Word - of - mouth marketing is an example of acoustic memes.

If you ever heard the phrase The Great Meme War of 2016 you probably lurked in more than a few politically conservative internet communities. I’m talking most specifically about 4chan and Reddit, and even more specifically about the /pol/ board of 4chan and The_Donald board of Reddit. Before we continue, I do not endorse /pol/ in any way shape or form, nor do I necessarily endorse the memes that are created from this internet underbelly. In fact, if you don’t advocate free speech in an extremely raw and unfiltered form, I suggest you stay far far away from that place. I am simply trying to frame a phenomenon that I believe has far greater significance for the human race than what may be currently perceived.

/Pol/ is a forum on the internet where people of all political ideologies come to participate in free speech discussion. Racism, Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, Bigotry, Nazism, etc. are all far more represented than most people would be comfortable with in the real world. A significant portion of the discussion on /pol/ are called shitposts, trolls, or baits which is simply someone stating something outrageous, baiting and daring people to respond to it in any rational sense whatsoever - usually to gain amusement out of someone else’s emotional distress. The german word for this is Schadenfreude - Deriving pleasure from somebody else’s pain. A lot of the discussion there is based less in rationality and more to just there to entice a reaction out of someone. Trolls are a common breed. Despite the vast amounts of conversational anarchy that occurs on this board, it is accompanied by a surprisingly large amount of legitimate rational discussion.

However irrational, illogical, and crazy these discussions can be however, they somehow manage to do this crazy thing - birth memes and change the world. Memes are filtered through Meme Engines, which are really just a collection of human beings choosing to share, mutate, or kill a particular idea. Now any idea or framing structure is considered a meme, regardless of strength. What differentiates memes from each other is their ability to reproduce, the rate at which they reproduce, and their longevity. Memes which are easily disproven or disapproved of die quickly. Memes in which people find entertainment, significant rational, and/or significant emotional impact often replicate faster and stay around much longer.

Now it just so happened that /pol/’s favorite for the presidential election was Donald J. Trump. Based upon what I’ve described above you can see why. He is a jackpot for memes. He invokes reaction, he introduces controversial ideas, and he incites discussion. What makes /pol/ so damn good at creating everlasting memes is the sheer ability to rally behind a particular meme as a ubiquitous group. 4chan used to be one of the internet’s only meme engines. Famous memes like Nyan Cat, all of the Rage Faces, all of the Advice Animals, and Rick Rolls were birthed in the womb of 4chan. Then Reddit emerged and Twitter and Facebook implemented hashtags and joined the game as Memetic Superpowers. Some argue that Reddit killed 4chan, that Twitter killed 4chan, or that BuzzFeed killed 4chan. While 4chan once dominated the internet as the sole Memetic Superpower, the popularity of the internet has allowed other websites to rise in competition. They all still hold significant importance due to the structure in which the information is shared.

Reddit is one of the most popular sites of the internet and in my opinion, the most powerful. Self dubbed “The Frontpage of the Internet” its sole mission is to take all of the internet’s content and force them through a memetic filter system. Each user gets one vote per post - up or down. Using Upvotes and Downvotes any content posted to Reddit can be encouraged or discouraged from garnering more popularity. The posts with the highest amount of upvotes appears higher up on the list of content you see. This mechanism is actually quite remarkable in it’s function of filtering the most popular memes of todays internet, which in essence, is really just people sharing ideas and information. Now Reddit’s meme filter does have it’s flaws - it encourages “fast” content over “slow” content. Pictures garner upvotes more quickly than long text paragraphs simply due to the fact that more people can sort through them faster. A text post that takes 5 minutes to read will garner upvotes at a slower rate than a photo that takes 5 seconds to look at, and therefor has less reach and less strength as a meme. Reddit has made alterations to its algorithm to address issues like these, but it still isn’t perfect. The front page of r/All is still far less diverse in content than the entirety of Reddit and most people don’t have the patience or interest to read long text posts rather than look at quick photos or headlines. That last part holds extreme significance. “Most people don’t have the patience or interest to read long text posts rather than look at quick photos or headlines.” Remember that. This idea, though especially significant for Reddit, is ubiquitous across all information sharing platforms including TV News, TV Shows, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… everything.

You must also remember that the content posted to reddit has to be created somewhere so it is a relevant question to ask, “Where is all this stuff coming from?” The answer is everywhere. As the diversity of Reddit is massive, and posting so easy, content comes anywhere from people’s iPhone Photo Galleries to News articles.

Memes gain strength through a sort of reverse pyramid. Now I have not conducted or read any scientific studies on whether this pyramid is liner, exponential, or random so I’m really just making the “Tiers” up to convey the concept. I sincerely hope I can frame this in a way that may garner more interest in studying this, as I believe it has significant potential in the fields of Marketing and Politics and everything in between.

Some of you may have read Malcom Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” where he illustrates that once things garner a certain amount of momentum, they hit a tipping point in which they explode in popularity. But we can break them down into smaller tipping points relevant to more specific scenarios. These tipping points are governed by the rules of the medium on which the meme is being conveyed. Websites considered Memetic Engines have different tipping points based upon the rules, setup, and algorithms of the site. Charting a memes popularity, you can see sharp increases in popularity as it hits different demographics jumping from medium to medium.

I am going to use today’s internet superpowers to illustrate how a meme is birthed and how it moves up this reversed Pyramid.

Meme Reach:

Failed Conception:

A meme is introduced and is immediately rejected by the populace.

Birth:

15 people - Flash Meme

Growth:

150 people - Meme has gained significant traction on one board or within one social circle for a short amount of time.

1,500 people - Meme has replicated across multiple boards and social circles within the same Memetic Engine.

15,000 people - Meme has replicated across Meme Engines and survived to replicated across many different demographics of people.

1,500,000 people - Meme has passed through rigorous filters of multiple Meme Engines and holds significant longevity and fertility.

Death:

Meme has demonstrated significant longevity and fertility but its relevance is fading. It is coming to the end of its lifecycle.

Let’s start on 4Chan.

Anyone can start a thread of discussion on 4chan, but that thread and the content in the original post will quickly fade into oblivion if it is not supported by an initial interest. The way 4chan works is that the most recently posted thread will appear on top. If you continuously refresh a board on 4Chan you will continuously see different threads, more or less. In addition, the threads with the most interest will therefore have the most posts and will continuously stay on top. 4Chan has ways to cycle content and prevent monopolies on threads dominating conversation by different mechanisms. Some boards have a time limit per thread, others have a post limit, and so forth. All work fairly well in my opinion, some have more longevity than others.

Once a meme meets the correct criteria for becoming popular on 4Chan it will replicate in copycat threads. If the meme starts to reproduce in that environment quite well the meme will start to appear in more threads than the original. 4chan even has its own memes that governs what memes are created. It gets complicated but it is obvious when you look at it through the correct lens. If someone who has never been to /pol/ goes there they might be entirely confused on what the actual fuck is going on. You really need to spend some time and learn the memes and culture of the board to be able to understand the structure in which other memes are created - in all engines. A fine example of this is “Facebook Etiquette.” As I’m sure more than one of you are aware, not being conscious of the memetic structure of an Engine can lead to quirky and often hilariously awkward exchanges - like when an elderly person has absolutely no idea how Facebook works and commits what are considered social media faux-pas.

If you are unfamiliar with the culture of /Pol/ the following is a fine example of 4chan etiquette. Brace yourself.

Let's say you wanted to start a thread to discuss Capitalism vs Communism. You could start a thread and say: "Let's discuss the pros and cons of capitalism vs communism." But that post would probabilistically garner little to no response. Instead, you should start a board like so: "Hey commu-fags, you will forever be in the shadow of capitalism, go fuck your mother." Not even kidding. If you are offended by this you are the sole reason why this has become the popular structure. The latter framing evokes emotional reaction and entices response. A thread with that title could very well spark an emotionally fueled response from a genuine communist trying to put you in your place. 4chan is such a harsh environment for meme survival that it takes extremely specific and contagious characteristics for memes to have any sort of longevity there. It is also why the memes that do end up multiplying in 4chan spread across the entire internet. Because it you can make it on 4chan, you can make it anywhere.

Once a meme becomes popular enough on 4chan it usually makes the jump to another social media platform. The most surefire filter system is to go through is Reddit, though jumps to Twitter are also probable, and less likely - Facebook and News Sites. A user of both 4chan and Reddit may see a meme on 4chan that is popular and take it over to Reddit. Reddit is 4chan’s main refinery. It filters out any of the memes that could only ever be popular on 4chan and increases the popularity of 4chan’s memes that are accepted by the general population and within other memetic structures. If 4chan is the oil well, Reddit is the refinery. Remember 4chan is a cesspool of free speech, good and bad, so many of the memes and ideas on 4chan are rejected by the general population who has a more strict filter on what ideas are socially normal and acceptable. Then again, many of them are embraced as well. Once a post becomes popular on reddit it successfully meets the criteria to become popular within the general population and, over time, depending on the strength of the meme, will most likely make it’s way into Facebook Feeds, and News Sites. The jump could also be made to Twitter, from 4chan. What makes 4chan significant is that it is organized in such a way that memes are filtered extremely rapidly. The structure of 4chan allows a vast amount of completely random A/B testing and mutation of memes. The type of meme can predict which platform it is most likely to succeed on. For example, often times 4chan’s community can catapult a meme up to the third tier of the pyramid, 1500, simple by starting a thread discussing how they should promote this meme on another platform.

This is where 4chan differs from other Meme Engines. Users can actively discuss reasons for creating memes and as a group (a meme army), decide to take this meme to other platforms in an organized method. The armies of 4chan can be so organized and in such numbers that they can often force tipping points on other social media when harnessed correctly. This is not as easily nor as often done on other social platforms. The sheer amount of circle jerking of 4chans boards means that it creates the most amounts of conscious memes, memes that are intentionally created for a purpose of a larger goal, out of any platform other than what is often called Mainstream Media - of which we will touch on later.

An example of 4chan's organizational influence occurred during all three of the Presidential Debates. 4chan created threads of all known online polls about who won the debates. For those who were there, they could watch as Clintons lead shrunk more and more in these polls until most of them showed Donald Trump handily winning the debates. This was a result of 4chan's organization. This also went completely unnoticed by many that simple saw the poll on their local news site and knew none the wiser.

If a meme on 4chan is a #hashtag type of meme, it will most likely jump to Twitter to be further filtered. If it is a content meme such as a visual photo or headline it will most likely jump to Reddit and then to Facebook and Instagram.

Once content has passed through the Filters of a major meme engine such as Twitter or Facebook, it is then often picked up by News Outlets. News outlets like BuzzFeed are in essence curators of Reddit/4Chan/Facebook's content. These engines are different in that a single person or team, such as a writer or editor, are the ones filtering the content instead of a vast amount of people. A single dictator system instead of a democratic voting system. From here the meme cycles and becomes more powerful. If a meme is of significant importance to society is it often picked up by major News Networks on television or by super-connectors/influencers like celebrities on Twitter. Many people view this form of meme, one that gets curated by a registered company, more legitimate than memes that simply filter through democratic engines. Their justification is often at the root, irrational, simply thinking that the News did it’s research and is presenting you important information, and that they dub this meme important enough to report on. The flaw in this logic is that companies like BuzzFeed, who’s business model is derived from traffic, are not there to curate the most important, accurate, and significant memes but rather the memes that garner the most clicks. Hence the rise of ClickBait media. ClickBait is essentially the same principle as the filter on 4chan. The articles that evoke the most reaction in the quickest amount of time are the biggest money makers for BuzzFeed. The threads that evoke the most reaction and garner the most interaction on 4chan are the memes that stay at the top of the board and become most pervasive. A good BuzzFeed writer is really just a person who is good at picking memes that haven’t yet become ubiquitous. Picking the allstars before they’re allstars.

Also, too often, media powerhouses are owned by larger organizations and will either consciously or sub-consiously for alliances with certain ideologies. Aligning with a particular party for interest can boost your ratings and guaranteed you an audience, and may also grant you privileged access to certain stories by becoming favorable to certain people.

There is a bit of self fulfilling prophecy with curated memes, in that they automatically have a certain reach. They are not subjected to the vicious democratic filters of millions of internet users like memes that organically rise out of 4chan and Reddit. This is why it is very difficult to force memes. In order to create a meme out of thin air, the curator has to have a talented ability to know that this meme would have passed through those rigorous filters anyway. Otherwise, the forced meme fails. This is often why the most powerful memes are the ones that arise organically though democratic filters.

The internet has become so influential in today’s age that memes filtered through curation are more often rejected by democratic filters than ever before. This is why Mainstream Media outlets are freaking out. They are losing their influence to social media - the worlds preferred and more efficient way of sharing information and news. Curator filtered news is increasingly at the mercy of democratically filtered news.

The concept of memes only grows stronger as information sharing becomes easier from individual to individual. You can safely predict that memes will continue to have more and more of an impact on this planet from here on out. If you follow this to the end, memes are the collective consciousness of the human race. When someday our technology reaches a point where our thoughts can be as rapidly and seamlessly shared with each other as our own thoughts are to ourselves, the collective mind will gain more and more significance.

Now that you have a general idea about how memes becomes popular, let’s talk about The Great Meme War of 2016 and it’s historical significance. In no other election before 2016 was the internet at a point in which it could have a significant impact on the outcome. The 2016 election was the first US presidential election in history in which the internet acted as a memetic and media superpower. It may have been a player in the game before, but in a metaphorical sense recently developed its nuclear ICBM. Most people were and still are completely oblivious to this. As TV subscriptions die, internet speed becomes faster, social media becomes ever more used as parts of our lives, internet media plays a larger and larger role.

The significance of 4chan’s discussion based meme filtration system becomes most obviously significant in the presence of a major US election. As political ideas are discussed, and as candidates emerge, the internet eats every bit of information, digests it, and spits out millennial meme form. Heavily discussed political topics on 4chan run to their conclusions and come out as simple image based memes that can be posted on Facebook. Why? Because ideas will only survive and replicate in the form in which it is most easy to do so. Just like water will always take the path of least resistance downhill, Memes will evolve and take the path of least resistance and evolve into a form that is most contagious. Very much like a virus - Hence the phrase “Going Viral.” Donald Trump capitalized on this to its fullest extent. He gave the Meme Engines highly refined super diesel fuel to start running redline during his 18 month campaign. He branded his opponents with highly contagious names like Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Sleepy Doc, and most famously, Crooked Hillary. These are the types of memes that easily pass through the Meme Engine’s filters. They are embraced. Wacky photoshops of Ted Cruz, GIFs on him eating his booger in a live debate, and hilarious spins on Trump’s politically incorrect behavior took the internet like storm.

At the beginning of the election cycle something remarkable happened that may have forever changed the course of human history. A board on Reddit was formed called The_Donald. It was a Donald Trump fan page. Rules were cult like. No criticism of the candidate was allowed. It purely existed so that fans of Donald Trump could upvote their hilariously and often tastefully absurd memes into the front page of reddit under the mission to “Make America Great Again.” At this point in the election the whole world seemed to be against Donald Trump’s legitimacy though simultaneously entertained by him. They were classic Trolls. Creating Memes that sparked reaction and replication. Schadenfreudists. It was like a giant fan party that ran 24/7. The reason why this subreddit was so pivotal is that it fully embraced Millennial Meme Culture. It embraced the absurdity that one could “Meme a candidate into the Whitehouse” by doing things like photoshopping Donald’s head onto the Terminator. I am to this day convinced that not one of those original members of the subreddit believed that this was actually possible.

Until they did.

Something weird happened in the primary runs. The_Donald started to actually convert people who were against Donald Trump into Golden Haired fans. Through memetic filtration, they grew a mascot, Pepe the Frog, and called themselves “Nimble Navigators.” They morphed from a board that solely made off the wall photoshops to a board that posted significant information regarding Trump - in a digestible and viral form. Through memetic evolution, by sheer evolutionary methods, Donald J. Trump found himself a Meme Engine growing organically in his back yard. He tended to it, kept it secret, showed it love (he even made an appearance there and answered some questions from people on the board), and helped perpetuate its rise. He fed it fuel by staying in the news cycle 24/7. The Mainstream TV networks embraced DJT because of their boost in ratings, the internets Meme Engines embraced him, and Donald Trump dominated the election cycle.

It may be curious to ask why Hillary Clinton’s board on reddit didn’t have the same effect. The answer is simple. If you recall I asked you to remember the line “Most people don’t have the patience or interest to read long text posts rather than look at quick photos or headlines.” They failed to embrace memetic culture and they didn’t have enough fuel to run the small engine they did create. It was like a Camry in a race vs a Bugatti. They failed to realize that ideas do not penetrate society solely by their rationality. They penetrate demographics by how well they can pass through memetic filters. How quickly can they be digested? Are they visual? Do they invoke a reaction? r/HillaryClinton tried to rationally explain away The_Donalds memes through lengthy source backed text posts. In the Meme Game, there is no contest on who wins that matchup. The_Donald was fueled by the underbelly called /pol/. /Pol/ organized a “Memetic Army” now fully convinced they could meme their candidate into the presidency. They created boards with pre-photoshopped text and photos that allowed others less savvy to create their own memes. They circulated the font file of Hillary’s campaign branding so others could hijack it and use it in their own memes. This increased the memetic variation 10-fold which allowed for a greater possibility some would make it through the great filters. The_Donald acted as a modified filter. Memes that would have not passed through on reddit’s standard r/Politics board were easy approved by members of The_Donald and because of their embrace of memes, they had the numbers to do it. In fact, The_Donalds Meme Engine was so powerful that it dominated up to the first 5 pages of Reddit’s r/All. Out ALL the content on the internet on the self proclaimed Front Page of The Internet, memes promoting Donald Trump rose above it all because of their massive fuel source from /pol/ and their customized filtration engine in r/The_Donald. It dominated so much that Reddit actually had to change its algorithm for the first time in over 5 years to prevent Donald Trump from dominated one of the most popular websites in the world. From here the memes would move to Twitter, Facebook, and TV News. Hashtags that were born out of strategic discussion on /Pol/ were trending on Twitter 3 weeks later.

/Pol/ didn’t stop at just creating new memes. One of their most effect weapons was completely hijacking the memes the enemy tried to counter with. Hillary Clinton had to change the slogan of her campaign a handful of times because the Memetic Army of Trump kept annihilating them. I’m with Her was hijacked to Trump’s with You. The “are you man enough to vote for her” campaign was eaten alive by the Memetic Engines when they photoshopped ridiculous scenarios of “Are you man enough” next to nu-male hipster feminine men, or transgender women. Systematically Clinton’s slogans were decimated by the memetic army. “I’m with Her,” “Make America Whole,” “Love and Kindness,” “Break Down Barriers,” “Build Ladders of Opportunity,” and “Love Trumps Hate,” were all hijacked and failed to pass through the Meme Engine’s filters to unify her base under a common vision.

Now before you say that these internet Meme Engines didn’t play a large role in the election, I would like to point out that time and time again the memes delivered by Donald’s army made it far past Reddit and 4chan. The memes created were so contagious, they worked their way into Fox News nightly, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere in between. Pepe the Frog, once an obscure meme on 4chan, became recognized and branded as a “hate symbol” by major left leaning news outlets. You could hear Trolls yell “Pepe!” at Hillary’s rallies in real life. Careers of Pro-Trump cartoonists were catapulted into fame. /Pol/ would even try “baiting” CNN into running ridiculous stories and actually succeeded a few times. Hundreds of thousands of people participated and became a unified army in “The Great Meme War of 2016.” The left didn’t stand a chance. This was an organic organized force against an unorganized and unmotivated opponent. Clinton camp even tried to create a counter-meme engine in a board called r/EnoughTrumpSpam. It failed miserably and was eaten alive by The_Donald.

2016 was also the first year in which a widely known company attempted to artificially support Pro-Clinton Memes. Clinton’s campaign famously hired the company called Correct The Record (CTR) to browse these social media platforms 24/7 and search for information that was anti-Hillary. They would then attempt to “correct the record” and spin discussion in favor of Clinton. It may have worked quite well if they didn’t get caught. They were caught through exposure of the copy-and-paste responses they used. The same exact responses and trends, word for word, could be seen popping up on various social platforms. Donald’s army then hijacked this opportunity and started pasting even MORE of the same responses everywhere further delegitimizing any Pro-Clinton voice on the internet. Any time someone said something pro-Clinton it would be dismissed as paid-for and illegitimate garnering responses like “Get out of this thread CTR”

Wikileaks dropped hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that would have taken a TV News team months to sort through. /Pol/ did it in days. The meme army was so organized an committed and had such large numbers they organized the contents, spun the frame, and memed them to the public. The_Donald then upvoted them into the upper tiers of our reverse pyramid where popular conservative news outlets grabbed them and reported them en masse. Self titled “weaponized autism” became a popular phrase as Wikileaks dropped vast quantities of documents. The meme army deployed their hilariously dubbed “weaponized autists” to sort through them with immense concentration to find dirt on the opponent. Those who were not "autistic" enough to comb through thousands of government emails were deployed to post the results on Twitter and Facebook using ubiquitous hashtags that would show up on “Top Trending” further enabling the Pro-Trump meme's replication and survival.

The meme army knew the rules of Memetic Warfare and spun current events with headlines that framed the information in favor of their opponent. “Most people don’t have the patience or interest to read long text posts rather than look at quick photos or headlines.” They knew the filtration system and dominated memes through spinning headlines and photos. Tucker Carlson of Fox News frequents The_Donald and his show is largely based off of the memes that rise to popularity on that board. Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. had made incognito appearances in /Pol/.

Now one may argue that these Meme Engines were not responsible for information that appeared on Mainstream Media outlets, and that they were simply the first to expose it. By nature, social media is “edited,” not by editors in a newsroom, but by a democratic process of filtration. One could argue that these Meme engines were simply faster and less accurate. The argument is certainly a possibility, but proof in other scenarios shows that they simply reside on the later stages of the pyramid by nature, and are ultimately at mercy to the foundation of the pyramid.

Lets go back to the definition of a meme:

A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture".[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

Memes are ideas and Memetic Warfare is the utilization of psychological and sociological biases in human nature to ensure that certain memes prevail over others. The ideas evolve into the most digestible forms possible. Many times, these memes appear irrational to the intellectuals who fail to grasp that human reality is inherently irrational, and that memes, similar to genes, are not selected upon for which is the best overall, only for which the natural pressures select for. Genes do not have a logical way of mutating other than to best survive in the environment for which they exists. Meme survival and reproduction is similar, in that the “correct” memes will continuously lose to the memes with the best characteristics for longevity and reproduction. Although accuracy and helpfulness are certainly factors that govern whether a meme succeeds, they are by far not the only ones.

Selective pressures also affect acoustic memes the same way that the affect digital memes. Ideas and information may spread differently during different cultural movements. For example, certain ideas that would never gain momentum during peacetime, my be extremely effective during wartime. And vice-versa

Now let's talk about Fake News.

By nature memes are not selected for by accuracy, but by fertility. Through the democratic filters of major Meme Engines, occasionally blatantly false narratives would pass though these filters because although false, met the criteria for vitality. This is a side effect of democratic filters. Now eventually, by democratic filtration, these memes DID die. Like cancer, they eventually replicated beyond their own survival and died, but not before they did damage.

The counter meme filtration system being pitched is in essence a Fascist one. To have curators ultimately decide whether a democratic meme is allowed to reproduce or is censored - To have a select group of curators choose which ideas can be discussed based upon their decision of accuracy may seem tempting in the face of cancerous memes, but rest assured carries with it its own threat to humanity as these powers will almost certainly eventually become corrupted.

I will argue that the solution to cancerous memes is to open the conversation and make it even MORE democratic than it currently is. The_Donald very early on was quarantined by Reddit, essentially walled off digitally from the rest of the site. This is information fascism and in my opinion will only result in more damaging memes in the future. To counteract a meme, one must allow the immune system of democratic filtration to work, similar to how the free market will price-correct milk and bread, memes will self correct when allowed contact with resistance.

Isolated Meme Engines will in-fact retain importance however, as they allow ideas to take root that may have never had the opportunity to if immediately subjected to all possible opposition. By passing through smaller filters first, the meme is allowed to replicate and evolve to better pass through other filters.

There are a vast amount of practical applications of this concept in the fields of Marketing and Politics especially. Memes can influence, start, and end entire cultural movements, encourage people to buy products and create and destroy brands. Studying the strength and persuasion abilities of the FORM of the information is even more important that finding the right information to begin with. Human behavior is irrational but it is predictable.