Research shows how memes evolve and mutate like DNA on Facebook

You know when people would put up status messages to show solidarity or outrage against a situation and end the message with a “Please put this as your status message for a day if you care”? Well, Facebook does and it has made public some fascinating findings regarding the spread and genetic mutation of meme based posts on the social networking website. A meme, explains Facebook, is an idea that is readily transmitted from person to person. Think of the modern day memes, with an image, you can describe a situation to make it look really funny or interesting. However, humans are not perfect transmitters and end up changing memes, intentionally or accidentally, embellishing them with the idea of improving memes. Facebook conducted a research that lasted from April 2009 to October 2011, starting off when the character limits on status updates were pulled by the site. It traced the growth and change of a Facebook update that read, “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day”. [caption id=“attachment_208108” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Here’s how the text varied[/caption]   In September 2009, over 470,000 people posted the exact same message. Some decided to improvise and add their names to the status. Many others even inserted a very popular line, “We’re only as strong as the weakest amongst us,” in the middle of the update. Researchers, who conducted the study at the University of Michigan, saw that imperfectly replicated text memes do indeed spread like genetic mutations. The team found about 121,605 variants of the same meme in 1.14 million status updates. Weirdly enough, some of these variants, that either tried to be funny or make a mockery of the meme, read, “No one should be frozen in carbonite because they can’t pay Jabba The Hut” and “No one should die because Obamacare rations their healthcare.” Essentially, playing to the gallery became important here and so did noticing who your audiences are. Facebook’s researchers have concluded that although it has been quite a task to draw parallels between how information evolves in a social network it’s shown some insight into how just one format of a meme can mutate over a period of time. One way the research ended was the introduction of the Share button on Facebook in 2011. With no way of being able to edit a shared post to add your two cents, the meme has been circulating untouched since. Is it any surprise then that Facebook has decided to tweak its algorithm to punish meme-based posts?