On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities
Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfieldz, Jeremy Blackburny, Emiliano De Cristofaroz,
Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhiniz, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangilz
2018
Cyprus University of Technology, University College London,
University of Alabama at Birmingham, Boston University, King’s College London
Internet memes are increasingly used to sway and manipulate public opinion. This prompts the need to study their propagation, evolution, and influence across the Web. In this paper, we detect and measure the propagation of memes across multiple Web communities, using a processing pipeline based on perceptual hashing and clustering techniques, and a dataset of 160M images from 2.6B posts gathered from Twitter, Reddit, 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board (/pol/), and Gab, over the course of 13 months.