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Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Facebook political memes and my upcoming experiment

You know what's annoying?  Facebook political meme graphics.  If you don't know what I am talking about, you will surely recognize them when I describe them.  They are those pictures (usually of a politician or other public figure, living or dead) with some uber-partisan wording on it that villifies a person in one party or another.  But here's the kicker -- there seems to be a rule in place that virtually none of them are allowed to make sense.  They have to contain either quotes that are made up, or "facts" that aren't true, or make assertions that no sane objective person would ever reach using the real facts and any form of logic known to mankind. 

These facebook meme pictures are frustrating for a couple reasons.  First, they take up a huge amount of space on one's timeline.  They are the facebook version of a pile of empty food wrappers on one's desk.  Second, they just make the person posting them look silly when (as is virtually always the case) the meme is factually inaccurate or is something that, absent the willful suspension of logic that comes with political tribalism, that person would NEVER accept an argument that lame.  And since I hate to see any of my friends (or even worse, ME!) looking silly, I resent facebook memes for the impact they have on otherwise sane and reasonable people.

So to make lemonade out of lemons, here's what I'm going to do at some point (maybe tomorrow, or maybe a year from now):  I'm going to make up a bunch of these meme graphics, and I'm going to make sure they contain the stupidest and most insane messaging possible.  BUT, that messaging will be highly derogatory about Obama (the main lightening rod for the Democrats right now) or whoever the most high profile Republican is at the time.  I will then make up one of those fan pages with a partisan theme (such as "Let's find a million people who like cancer more than Obama" or "I'd rather live in Iran than vote for a Republican"), and begin the process of distributing them on facebook.

From there, I will track how long it takes each meme to make it back to my own timeline (posted by one of my facebook friends) and how many of my facebook friends post each one.

Based on that, I will have a very loose, but relatively scientific, way of measuring whether I have more gullible partisan Republicans or Democrats in my friends list.

It should be a fun experiment.  Has anyone else ever tried any experiments similar to this?  Making up bullshit chain emails or things like that just to see if people would be gullible enough to believe it and pass it along?  If you have, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it!

I sure wish the meme-maker for the one I posted here had a better command of the difference between "to" and "too" and the proper usage of apostrophes, but the bar is set pretty low when it comes to these things, and it was the most appropriate one I could find.

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