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Comment by mu_killnine | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this study includes memes like that or only actual site links external to Facebook.

I have similar experiences with older loved ones I'm friend with on Facebook and it's rare they send links. But I think the rampant meme-sharing of misinformation/disinformation is much more prevalent.

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I'm really really loathe to say this ... but in today's climate, "memes are news". I have 100% had the contents of memes thrown at me in a political discussion. I happen to be online a lot, so in many cases, I've seen the meme scroll by and it's easy both to realize what it is (fake propaganda), and easy to debunk ... but to those folks, it's as real as if delivered by Walter Cronkite's lips.

The last election really turned me off of social media. The amount of absolutely false memes and screenshots being shared by both sides was way too much. I recently saw some of the ads and memes being churned out by the Russian propaganda machine. I was not so surprised some of the stuff they created was the same crap people I knew were sharing as truth by intelligent yet older people.

Where is the primary source of this, where can I go to see popular memes?

I read HN, Reddit and sometimes /., and I guess due to my settings I miss a lot of stuff. I'm not on FB, IG or snap, is that why I'm missing these memes?

Mainly facebook, twitter, and some of the seedier areas of reddit (AFAIK, depends on who you follow) ... it's also quite concerning how many of these memes and conspiracies seem to originate in 4chan; a literal hive of scum and villainy (and trolls, foremost). I never would have imagined I'd see the day when I would see prominent personalities and politicians literally tweeting screenshots of 4chan threads

My personal experience has been it's almost exclusively on FB in the U.S. I've heard it's big on WhatsApp in Brazil which is strange, but believable.

Reddit is a good place and they even have subreddits about Russian botnets posting comments. If I look on Facebook it’s mostly other people sharing them not me and I don’t know where they get them.

Some of this stuff is just political garbage in meme style. Basically a pic with block letters.

> both sides

Sure.

In my experience (and this is explicitly anecdotal) ... it seems like liberal memes tend to either satirize a politician's actions or repeat opinion-based editorial info, while conservative memes are more often explicitly fake ... yes, satirical/op-ed memes obviously exist there, but I see more obviously false and easily-debunked conservative memes.

For the conservative, those op-ed memes can tend to be interpreted as the oft-quoted "fake news", which is where I'm guessing the "both sides" sentiment comes from.

Again, that's just entirely my anecdotal experience.

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