Don’t touch it.
The feeling that you mocked stupidity and felt moral superiority over a dim-witted opponent is false — in reality, the parasite just used you for self-replication.
Every time you comment on social media with “you’re an idiot, you’re wrong” or “look how stupid this guy is” — forgive my bluntness, but the only fool here is you. Why? Because memes in social networks replicate by the laws of parasitology. The winner is the one that manages to infect the largest number of hosts. Once it infects the host, the parasite literally takes control of neural pathways to speed up its own reproduction. The feeling that you mocked stupidity and felt moral superiority over a dim-witted opponent is false — in reality, the parasite just used you for self-replication.
There are countless examples in nature: Toxoplasma gondii infects rats and removes their innate fear of cat odor, making them easy prey. Ophiocordyceps (the “zombie fungus”) forces an ant to climb high and lock its jaws onto a leaf so the fungus can better spread spores. Leucochloridium paradoxum (a parasitic worm) invades a snail and hijacks its movement, forcing it into the open while its pulsating tentacles mimic caterpillars to attract birds. Parasites are not only animals — memes can be parasites too (“certain systems of misbelief can be fruitfully treated as cultural parasites”). Destructive cultural memes (or mental viruses) are parasites of consciousness.
Memes trigger your emotional circuits through any emotion (anger, nostalgia, laughter, etc.) and force you to comment, argue, “debunk,” mock someone, read more debunkings, ridicule, or repost with a caption like “look at this idiot.” All of this has only one outcome — accelerating the spread of the meme-parasite. You got infected, and now algorithms will infect your friends on social media. Many media outlets do the same thing — by “debunking,” they are merely spreading the infection further.
The more you smear yourself with infected feces, the greater the chance of infecting yourself and your loved ones. With regular parasites it’s actually easier — you can kill them with antiparasitics. But memes are harder to “unsee” — which is why conspiracy theorists, cult victims, and addicts are so hard to cure.
Lies (viral memes) spread on social media much faster and wider than truth: they are retweeted 70% more often, reach audiences of 1,500 people about 6 times faster, penetrate networks 10–20 times deeper, and the top 1% of fakes reach between 1,000 and 100,000 people, while truthful news rarely spreads beyond a thousand.
So what should you do?
1. Don’t touch.
Don’t touch feces with parasite eggs. As with ordinary parasites, old-fashioned hygiene helps. If you see infected feces, don’t pick them up. Don’t bring feces home (onto your page). Don’t poke at feces with a stick and examine the details — you’ll get infected. Don’t collect infected feces and send them to friends. If someone shits infected feces in your house (on your page), you need to clean it up so your guests don’t get infected.
2. Minimize the risk of repeated exposure.
“Don’t show, report, block.” Any other interaction increases the risk of infection. Algorithmic feeds are biolabs of destructive memes competing for the fastest hijack of your brain. Read more books, read through friend-curated feeds, subscribe to newsletters — places with more cultural hygiene.
Parasites of the mind. Why cultural theorists need the meme’s eye view Сognitive Systems Research Volume 52, December 2018, Pages 155-167
Why join groups? Lessons from parasite-manipulated Artemia Ecol Lett 2013 Apr;16(4):493-501.
The spread of true and false news online SCIENCE 9 Mar 2018 Vol 359, Issue 6380 pp. 1146-1151
Emotions explain differences in the diffusion of true vs. false social media rumors Scientific Reports Volume 11, Article number: 22721 (2021)