The ugly dark side of Facebook memes
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.
(Source: digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com)
