The evolution of memes on Facebook [Facebook Data Science]

Data science, Facebook-scale

"We’ve observed a number of remarkable parallels between how information evolves in a social network and how genes evolve. Drawing these parallels simply hasn’t been possible before for lack of large-scale data containing the evolution histories of many memes. Here we examined near-complete traces of hundreds of memes, collectively comprising over 460 million individual instances.  Although the study is limited to just the Facebook context, and just on format of meme (textual status updates), we believe it provides useful insight into the behavior of ideas transmitted via social ties in general."

The evolution of memes on Facebook