Abstract
Table 1: 4-grams which conferred replicative advantage on the variants which contained them, within memes where they represented between 5 and 95% of the population.
['4 gram', '[ITALIC] rg', '# memes']
Along with copy and paste instructions (“copy and paste”,“as your status”,“into your status”), these include encouragement and allusions to competition (“see how many people”), persistence cues (“status for at least”), or conditions that are easy to match or identify with (“if you love your”, “if you know someone”, “paste if you agree”, “proud to be a”). A specific pattern, “of you won’t”, occurred in prompts such as ‘95% of you won’t copy this, but the 5% who [have a positive attribute] will’. 144 memes contained at least one variant matching “won’t […] will”. These variants had significantly higher likelihood of being copied, 10.98 copies on average, relative to an average of 7.05 overall. In 102 of the 144 cases the individual who introduced the phrasing into the meme had either used it previously in another meme, or had a friend who had, suggesting that in a large number of cases the substring could have been transferred from one meme to another. On the other hand, some copy errors, occurring in significant numbers, e.g. “ago comment like unlike write”, which indicate spurious selection of Facebook boilerplate text below the update, enjoyed only one fourth of the popularity of variants which did not contain them, possibly indicating a notion of grammatical fitness. This is further supported by a mild negative correlation between the within-meme relative number of English spelling errors s for a variant and its popularity y (ρ(s,log(y))=−0.133,p<10−15). In biology, mutations occur randomly and blindly. Neutral mutations do not affect gene function, deleterious mutations are evolutionarily disadvantageous, while advantageous mutations provide a positive benefit to its carriers. Extending the analogy, neutral edits in memes are minor edits to the string that do not change the meaning of the meme. The Yule process is a neutral model where each meme variant has the same probability of copying itself, and possibly mutating again. There is one critical difference between biology and social media: evolution is a blind process in biology, but in social media, there can be a conscious effort to create mutations that will intentionally spread a meme’s presence (i.e. marketing campaigns). We discuss further similarities, as well as some mechanistic differences, pertaining to the more detailed replication mechanism, below.