Task 2 – Isaac Worcester

The meaning of this meme is telling someone to kill themselves. This was popularized on X (formerly twitter) where people would post this into the replies of tweets they disagreed with. While some users may have thought of this as funny and light hearted, some users may have found this upsetting or even taken it seriously. Suicide is a sensitive and potentially triggering topic for some, and posting this under something you disagree with rather than trying to engage in normal discussion can be harmful. People who are not mentally stable and dealing with something such as suicide ideation may be pushed over the edge by a meme like this.

The effect this meme has is belittling the other person down to the point of suggesting they kill themselves. This has probably led to some users feeling depressed and feeling down. They may be feeling this way because they feel they aren’t accepted into a certain online community. Another effect is many users will find this as comedic or funny, which is probably the primary reason this meme exists. Most users probably consider this “dank” or consider it “dark” humor, which to many is considered funny.

I think this meme would have some viral quality, because it is also funny in its own way. Many users might see this meme and realize they should feel better about themselves, not worse. It also can be posted in response to the previous meme and users may find this funny and almost healing in a way.

I think for us to make a change to view good news more than bad news, people would have to stop engaging with the bad news. According to an article titled: Why We Seem to Prefer Bad News Over Good News they say that, “In a study by Claire E. Robertson and colleagues published in Nature Human Behavior, the authors analyzed the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. They found that “ Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates).”” If people forced themselves to stop engaging with negative headlines and focused more on positive headlines the algorithms used to feed us information would push more positive content out to people. I feel like companies could regulate this by forcing their algorithms to push more positive content, but this also would probably not happen as it could cause companies to lose profit. BlueSky allows users to create their own feeds, which can enable them to create more positive feeds of information. While it itself isn’t necessarily a positive news source, bluesky can be one if you customize your feed to be that way.