Undead Social Media Zombies Infected By Memetic Cognitohazards
I study the memetic layer of epidemiological models of pathogen spread, such as COVID. I’m a bioinformatician with a background in genetic ontologies. Diseases spread behaviorally, and cultural behaviors have a memetic signature—because behaviors drive spread. I apply an SIR model to memetics.
Many people on social media, especially on Bluesky, resemble 4chan users memetically. I used Gephi and Cytoscape to analyze their posts and compare their phylogenetics to a 4chan memetic database compiled by LLMs trained on toxic forums. Many users on Reddit, Bluesky, and Discord are riddled with memetic diseases phylogenetically descended from 4chan.
Pathological or toxic memes (ideas, behaviors, language patterns) that started or were popular on 4chan have evolved over time. These evolved versions now appear in other places—like Reddit, Bluesky, and Discord—but still carry a “genetic” signature that traces back to 4chan. So even if the memes look slightly different or are used in different contexts, you can still tell they’re “descendants” of earlier 4chan content, much like you can tell a dog evolved from wolves.
I treat social media users as zombies. Some biological infections hijack their hosts’ behavior and cause them to spread the infection—like one that makes cat urine smell appealing to rats so they’ll be eaten by cats, allowing the infection to reproduce in the cat’s gut.
Memetic patterns work the same way in people.
Fediverse Reactions
#4chan #Bluesky #cognitohazards #COVID #Discord #disinformation #LLM #LLMs #meme #memes #misinformation #propaganda #radical #radicalization #Reddit #socialMedia #zombies
