Courtesy of BuzzFeed
By Jack Stuef
James
Denham does not have a strong social media following. He’s basically
anonymous; type his name into Google, and you’re not going to find
anything about him. But in January, Denham ran across an image of what
appeared to be two teenagers cruelly hanging a puppy by a string and
posted it to his Facebook wall. Text on the image implores users to
“share this picture” and contact authorities if they recognize the
perpetrators.
The photo has since been shared over 70,000 times
from this profile, making it among the most widely viewed content on the
site. Yet what Denham didn’t realize at first is this image has been
circulating on the Internet for years, and the culprits were identified
long ago. The photo is completely useless at this point. It appears
somebody eventually notified Denham of the image’s past, as he has left
multiple comments on his post trying to alert other users to its
history. But it’s been in vain. The photo continues to be spread around
by oblivious people every day, despite the comments and despite being of
absolutely no use to the world.
Facebook is great for sharing
funny things, but the truly funny ones almost always come from somewhere
else. These don't. These are Facebook’s memes.
The Facebook share
button, in its current iteration, allows users to take content from
another user’s profile and re-post it on their own profiles, along with a
byline from the original poster. By design, it works like Tumblr’s
reblog or Twitter’s retweet function. In practice, it can work more like
a human centipede.
These shared items, which are usually an image
that has text, or sometimes an image accompanied by an urban-legend
type caption, carry on the legacy of chain emails that were a major part
of Internet culture in the 90s. Such spam has since diminished as
Internet content has grown and, along with its users, become more
sophisticated. That these dumb images, which regularly accumulate tens
or hundreds of thousands of “shares,” now rival even the most “liked”
articles and videos on Facebook, is an embarrassment for the social
network.
Courtesy of BuzzFeed
Urban legendsSome of these shares,
like this one
recounting a hoax story about a woman on an airplane complaining about
sitting next to a black man, got their start as chain emails.
Snopes.com
dates
this tale back to 1998. On Facebook, a photo of a white flight
attendant is used to make the story shareable. At least one posting of
this urban legend has more than 100,000 shares and likes combined. Note:
That's just a single post on one profile – there are many, many more.
The
NAACP’s Facebook page,
by contrast, had less than 106,000 likes at the time of this post.
Perhaps if that organization had spent more time spreading made-up
stories about bigots in the sky and less time trying to get civil rights
legislation passed, it would be more popular on Facebook today.
The
users who post these things are often shameless and have no qualms
about asking for shares in the caption or in the image itself.
Quotations of dubious origin are also a favorite Facebook meme. People elsewhere on the Internet have
debunked the
attributions on Betty White and John Wayne quotes, but that hasn't made a difference.
The
debunkings of these memes are never going to be shared nearly as
broadly as the memes themselves, which seem like they will become viral
intermittently in perpetuity. John Wayne and Betty White will be
“saying” these things on Facebook until its users forget who they are.
At that point, the quotes will be attributed to elderly stars like
Justin Bieber and that dog from "The Artist."
Courtesy of BuzzFeed
Of
course, we can’t expect like-hungry trolls to stop at photos of abused
puppies. Congratulations, babies with serious medical conditions —
you’re all Facebook famous! Such memes use the same tactic: exploit a
small dying child’s photographs; write a breathless, obviously
fallacious caption about how this kid will only get the medical care he
or she needs if the meme scores enough likes and shares; and watch the
attention roll in. Meanwhile, the child either recovers without your
help or dies. Or the child's been dead for years.
Political rhetoricDespite
Facebook sponsoring presidential debates, interviewing newsmakers and
commissioning opinion polls, keeping up appearances as an important
American institution and serious media organization concerned with civic
values, the prevailing political discourse is as rotten as any Facebook
meme.
It’s telling that the only political item on Facebook’s top 40
“most shared” news article list of 2011
was a blurry, resized infographic of debatable accuracy: Occupy Party
vs Tea Party Comparison. That’s exactly the sort of thing that becomes a
Facebook political meme, albeit even more poorly made and less likely
to be factual.
Courtesy of BuzzFeed
The image above, as BuzzFeed’s J.P. Moore
reported
in January, has been among the most widely shared by conservatives on
Facebook. It’s brilliantly stupid the way only chain e-mail propaganda
can be.
Courtesy of BuzzFeed
Courtesy of BuzzFeed
These two memes are among the
most widely shared by liberals, and they’re both wildly inaccurate. The "Who Increased the Debt?" chart had already been
discredited by political fact-check blogs many months before it appeared on Facebook. The photo of Mitt Romney is a 2008
Getty image
showing the presidential candidate going through airport security
before boarding a plane. But somebody decided it looked like the
official wanding him was actually shining his shoes, so another meme
predicated on misinformation was born.
These political memes may
be the most insidious of all, because they could – theoretically – have
serious effects not only on the discourse, but on election outcomes as
well. Political images spread quickly in part because Facebook users’
friends are by and large demographically similar to themselves. Most
conservatives are mostly friends with conservatives; most liberals are
mostly friends with other liberals. These politically insular memes
confirm and strengthen users’ ideological beliefs, and truth is
optional. One can’t just dismiss these memes because they’re dumb,
poorly made and factually challenged. Facebook is huge, and this is its
most popular content.
Facebook may now be America’s greatest
entertainment, but the junk content that is increasingly working its way
into our news feeds makes eHow articles look like the Great American
Novel.
Facebook would be more enjoyable for some people if it went
back to the basics and focused on its original role as a virtual hub
for maintaining real-life friendships. As
some have suggested,
it could encourage users to take time to mass-unfriend people and prune
their network into a group of true friends they actually care about.
Instead of worrying about the threats posed by other kinds of social
networks and jamming similar features into Facebook after they become
popular elsewhere (Instagram, for instance), the company could focus on
cautiously improving what it does best and learn to live among a
community of social networks that offer different things to different
people. But it seems there’s no turning back.
Still, if enough
people complain about these memes littering the site, I’m sure Facebook
will find a way to clean it up for the users who don’t want to see it.
The company eventually managed to tuck "Mafia Wars" requests away into
the profiles of people who actually want to play the game, to the relief
of the majority of its users who just can’t seem to see the vital
importance of helping a friend steal a virtual handgun in text-based
Chicago. That’s no small feat.
A longer version of this story (with even more crazy images of Facebook memes) originally appeared on BuzzFeed. 
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