Rebecca Rosen highlights a study (pdf) of how one Facebook meme replicated and evolved over the course of two years:
Sometime around early September of 2009, someone decided to show their support for President Obama’s healthcare bill with a Facebook status. It read, roughly:
No one should die because they cannot afford health care and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree please post this as your status for the rest of the day.
And more than 470,000 people agreed verbatim. That’s how many people copied and pasted this precise formulation and reshared it. But while copy-and-paste is good enough for some, many people out there changed it. Over the next two years, the “no one should” meme, as Facebook data scientists refer to it in a new paper, would be posted 1.14 million times in more than 120,000 variants. …
Not surprisingly, the researchers found that the popularity of the assorted “no one should” mutations varied across the political spectrum. Though the meme began as a show of support for President Obama’s health-care plan—a position favored by liberals—conservatives had their fun with it too, sharing status such as “no one should die because Obamacare rations their healthcare” or “no one should go broke because government taxes and spends.” Also popular among conservatives? Alcohol.
(Chart: Average political bias associated with various mutations of the meme. -2 = very liberal; +2 = very conservative; based on user-reported political affiliations in their Facebook profiles.)
The Dish 