Editing Facebook/Groups

 

Facebook's ironic meme community, or Weird Facebook, has two important components. They are '''memepages''' and '''shitpost groups'''. A third, yet underdeveloped component are individual users with many followers, called ''influencers'' by Facebook. This article focuses on the ironic meme community and the geography of Facebook memepages.

 

Note: There are important differences between a ‘page’ and a ‘group’. A page acts as a single profile and may be operated by multiple administrators. Unless a user has chosen to see the page first or receive notifications for all posts by the page, not all posts from a page are visible on the main feed of the users that follow a page. Even pages which post very often do not generally reach the same rate of activity as a large group, as multiple users can post into one group. A page is always publicly accessible and therefore much more likely to attract new participants in the comments section, whereas a group is generally only accessed by members of that group or those invited by said members. This leads to a higher risk of mass-reports for a page, which can result in its deletion by Facebook, as well as exposure to radically different groups of users.  

=== Early 2014: The Golden Age of Historical Alliteration Memepages and the Great Meme War ===

During early 2014, pages seldom had more than 10 thousand likes, and just one thousand likes qualified a page to participate in the scene as a respectable player. Interaction between pages playing personas such as various countries is an important part of community and content, which often relied on role play narratives by the pages. Shitposting groups were seldom connected to memepages. The ironic meme movement reached escape velocity during this time as making a Facebook page to experiment with the features became popular and accessible.  

The most important family of memepages during this era was the historical alliteration memepage. These pages had specific themes about various countries in history such as “Jammin’ Japanese Memes”, “Edgy Egyptian Memes” or “Kinky But Kosher Korean Memes” and produced large amounts of original content based on parodying normie memes by replacing their contents with history trivia. These pages engaged in role play as part of their performance, play acting wars by making memes depicting conflicts between each other or forming alliances and sharing each other’s content or pages to boost the ally’s reach.  

The proliferation of memepages and their competition for reach resulted in the first Great Meme War of 2014. Admins of various pages took advantage of Facebook’s faulty moderation system, rallying followers to report competitors until their pages were deleted. The practice of creating ‘backup pages’ became commonplace during this time, in order to quickly rebuild following in case of such deletion.  

At this stage in late 2014, the biggest pages have around 50 thousand likes. Most memepages are happy enough with 20 thousand or fewer. There was a shift from dramatized interactions between memepages to engagement with the fan base for more exposure and growth. Some pages began creating groups for their fans to shitpost in. The Second Great Meme War was much larger in scale than the first, and highly political. The US general elections saw an explosion of political memes both in and out of Facebook, attracting huge amounts of membership to various politics themed discussion groups and pages. Competition for reach and influence between the left and the right resulted in countless leftist-themed and rightist-themed pages forming alliances and rivalries which frequently resulted in mass reports and page deletions on Facebook. Much of the memes during this time on memepages were imported from 4chan and 8ch where they were invented. The tradition of creating original content derived from pre-existing templates also continued to develop, as memepages competed to scoop one another on trending topics and political news to make memes about.

By 2017, the largest memepages, which have achieved mainstream success, have between 500 thousand and several million likes (i.e. followers). Smaller memepages focusing on more specific topics and relatively niche themes have 50-150 thousand likes. The US presidential election saw an explosion of fan groups and fan pages about politics, which saw hundreds of thousands of members posting into one group. While users with a background in anonymous imageboard culture dominated the memepage scene with their libertarian use of controversial humor, left-leaning users prospered in the shitposting group scene taking advantage of group moderation tools.  

Facebook memepages and shitposting groups are decentralized but often collaborate or overlap in demographic to form clusters, depending on content created and shared. The two most important deciding factors for cluster formation are '''form''' and '''content'''. The form involves the aesthetic aspects of the content produced by a page or group members, such as with art pages sharing each other's artworks or ironic memepages posting memes that parody less esoteric pages. The content involves the subject matters dealt with in the memes posted, such as academic pages sharing scientific trivia or leftist pages posting political articles. Because pages receive reach for both  

==== Animal memepages ====