They're viral, and just like viruses they can evolve to survive better.

In this case how would you say they evolve to survive?

I would propose that they evolve to either:
A). Empower the holder of the thought (ie education or knowledge
B). Personalise themselves to the holder of the thought - ie make themselves a part of your identity or become highly relatable.
C). Play on emotions - if they have an ability to polarise your emotions ie make you fear, worry or feel threatened or on the contrary alleviate stress / make you feel happy and at peace or feel love etc they will stay in your conscious attention.

This list is not exhaustive but I would say simply put, whatever makes a thought of ever greater value or importance to a person is unlikely to be forgotten and more likely to influence one's behaviour: ie be spoken to others. Or demonstrated.

It seems to me social media algorithms are tailored to these principles of highly personalised, highly relatable and outrage or community invoking sentiments.

your list is a good start. Not all ideas have to be beneficial to the holder, but they should usually not be explicitly super harmful or they will die too quick (viruses have this same property - a virus that's too eager to kill it's host quickly doesn't spread).

Very true. A thought that is so horrifying or harmful it makes the holder commit suicide instantly wouldn't be able to spread very successfully. Think Bird box - except the agent isn't witnessed but rather whispered from one person to another

Could it be that your mind is just a collection of thoughts. Some thoughts may stay, others will go, but suppose that you bump your head and forget absolutely everything. Are you still you now that you have forgotten everything?

If it's that simple, that hearing a phrase infects my brain with a meme or idea, then I can stop this discussion in its tracks by saying, "Don't think that viral ideas are bullshit."

Still think that ideas are viral?

It seems to me social media algorithms are tailored to these principles of highly personalised, highly relatable and outrage or community invoking sentiments. — Benj96

Social media algorithms are designed for an audience whose mental lives are spent on the surface of a shallow pond. That put-down applies to a lot of people. Their shallow depth isn't the creation of social media -- people have been shallow for a very long time. People are not stupid, but depth takes sustained effort, which is difficult for many people. Killing saber toothed tigers, domesticating wolves, figuring out how to get agriculture started, milking cows, mining coal, greeting every "guest" who walks into a Walmart... it all keeps us busy. No time for Plato and Aristotle.

As for instant outrage, yes. Social media is very good at masturbating the masses.

You may have gotten the impression that I do not like social media (like Facebook, twitter, shitter, x, et al. Quite right. I don't.

↪Benj96 If it's that simple, that hearing a phrase infects my brain with a meme or idea, then I can stop this discussion in its tracks by saying, "Don't think that viral ideas are bullshit."

Still think that ideas are viral? — BC

You missed the point. The point being made does not regard what you do with the ideas or memes you're exposed to. Simply that the idea or meme is often not ignorable and thus requires automatically to be accepted or rejected. In your case "rejected" through the reactionary development of a counter-argument or rebuttal. In any case that reaction requires that your mind invariable acknowledges or absorbs the ideas and thoughts presented to you. Otherwise how can you reject them?

The issue here is not that you can't reject what you hear or see. It's that you see and hear so much that you cannot maintain awareness of every micro-indoctrination you receive. Some are simply subconsciously integrated under the radar of your conscious attention but are no less effectual on your sum outlook/perspective.

If an idea is repeatedly and subtley presented for a long period of time, its unlikely it won't effect your reality framework eventually.

This is a basis for the development of prejudices, cultures etc. The passive absorption of some thoughts and ideas you weren't actively analysing upon receiving them.

. People are not stupid, but depth takes sustained effort, which is difficult for many people. Killing saber toothed tigers, domesticating wolves, figuring out how to get agriculture started, milking cows, mining coal, greeting every "guest" who walks into a Walmart... it all keeps us busy. No time for Plato and Aristotle. — BC

Well... "distraction" has maintained a stable status as an effective way to disarm people. Especially if you have an underlying dogma or agenda you wish to incept slowly and gradually into the target audience.

What I'm saying is that the spread of thoughts can be viral in that they need not gain acceptance, merely seed the kernel of doubt. After that the skepticism can build and warp or mould minds who are especially vulnerable....ie the "impressionable"..

I would argue that few people on this forum are impressionable or easily persuaded. But this is not a fair cross section of society as a whole. Not everyone seeks out philosophical discussion nor hones their critical thinking abilities.

That in itself lends importance to fostering philosophy as a basic educational tenet. I for one cannot understand how so many education systems overlook this subject. As education is not just facts, it is also a form of resilience to malicious yet effective propaganda

We can reject the thoughts of others for sure. Ignore them to the best of our ability. But they're already memorised. Especially if they're of perosnal importance/implication, outrageous, shocking or otherwise emotive.

In some sense I would say there's no such thing as "selective hearing" only "selective listening" -ie the actionable consequence of registering what you heard. — Benj96

The computer metaphor of mind, where the mind inputs data , information from ann external world and then processes this raw data, only takes us so far. Whether we ‘want’ to experience an event or not, even at the perceptual level experience is already conceptually processed and filtered relative to our goals and expectations. Put differently, we may not ‘want’ to see or hear something, but when it knocks at the gates of consciousness, whether we allow it entry or not depends on its relevance and interest for us. This is where models of conditioning and brainwashing fall short. What other people expose us to only provides an opportunity for us to make something out of it. Whether in fact we do, and what exactly we make out of it, is up to us, not them.

Take the millions of Trump loyalists (MAGA). They are skeptical of the electoral system, the government, the science establishment, and so on. Their conservative political beliefs are strongly correlated with conservative religious belief. They didn't get this way on the basis of viral media posts or years of sustained Trump actions, speeches, and appearances. It takes a long time to achieve their state of mind.

The same thing is true of Bernie Boys, or any number of recognizable political, social, religious, or economic class groupings.

OK. I will acknowledge, affirm, and attest to the potential virality of images, words, slogans, phrases, and ideas. Social media is set up to facilitate this kind of rapid dispersion. Rapid dispersion isn't new, of course. It's just faster now with electronic media than it was before radio, television, and lately the internet.

Well... "distraction" has maintained a stable status as an effective way to disarm people. Especially if you have an underlying dogma or agenda you wish to incept slowly and gradually into the target audience. — Benj96

Absolutely, but incepting large, heavy, complicated ideas into an audience is time consuming and requires a lot of varied repetition.

The pro-palestinian campus demonstrations look like a sudden eruption. The anti-Vietnam war demonstrations also seemed to erupt out of nowhere. In both cases, there was a fairly long period of fermentation before eruption. The pulverization of Gaza (as wars go) is in the present moment, but the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is many decades long. The decision to set up tents on campus or occupy buildings in the past couple of weeks might be sort of viral. Spring is a popular time to raise a ruckus. Likely there were some actual coordinating efforts.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was viral in nature. I live in "fly over" land, so east/west coast events arrive here late. When it did arrive, it was clearly a re-enactment of televised events in New York City, The local Occupy Minneapolis City Hall Plaza was a refreshing piece of political theater, but not substantive.

"Went viral" is an annoying viral phrase. The Oxford Dictionary people add a few new words every year which went viral and got used a lot. I'm out of the loop, so I haven't often not heard these expressions often, or at all.

In any case that reaction requires that your mind invariable acknowledges or absorbs the ideas and thoughts presented to you. Otherwise how can you reject them? — Benj96

I don't know whether the 'viral meme' behaves like a virus invading the body -- where the immune system has to register the agent of invasion before it can create antibodies. A novel rhino virus variety triggers a cascade of immune responses which produce the cold we suffer from. Next time, the same virus will not get very far.

I've imbibed a lot of Nazi propaganda by reading about the history of National Socialism in Germany. Reading about the history of race riots and racial discrimination in the United States has resulted in my exposure to a lot of racist ideas. Reading about the 19th century expansion of the United States across the continent has inoculated me with many ideas about the success of settler colonialism. If one reads the history of the British Empire, one will get exposed to a host of ideas about how the world can be run that give short shrift to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A trip through the history of the Romanovs in Russia will provide one with the inside story of despotism, enlightened and otherwise.

Rather than making me MORE susceptible to Nazi, racist, imperialist, settler colonial thinking, reading about the appalling behavior has strengthened bias (antibodies) against these ideas.

I've read these various histories as a mature (old) adult which is a good thing. Perhaps I would not have developed resistance to these kinds of ideas had I encountered them in 1936 Germany, 1920 Oklahoma, or 1880 London. I did encounter the ideas of settler colonialism as a child in 1950s Minnesota (and later) and the way we conducted westward expansion seems like gold plated history. Perfectly sensible. (Yes, I am now quite aware of the genocidal nature of the expansion).

But the Nazis, the white racists, the British colonialists, and the American establishment wasn't inoculating people with bits of viral thoughts. They were all indoctrinating the populations with train loads of propaganda, education, printed and media information backed up with material force.

One can break down a global system of propaganda (to which Germans were subjected) into little darts of data. For instance, a gross drawing of a Jew in Völkischer Beobachter, or a detail about how a Jew defiled an aryan woman. Or, how a Chicago newspaper describes a black slum in 1957, describing the blacks as causative agents in their deteriorated housing.

Minnesota school children learn about the federal government hanging 38 members of the Dakota tribe in Minnesota in the largest mass execution in United States history, on December 26, 1862, following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. It was presented as a victory for white settlers against the murderous Dakota people. One hopes this presentation has changed by 2024 in all Minnesota History classes.

Rather than making me MORE susceptible to Nazi, racist, imperialist, settler colonial thinking, reading about the appalling behavior has strengthened bias (antibodies) against these ideas. — BC

Well you answered your own qualm. My OP on the virality of thoughts is not explicitly about being indoctrinated by them. As you said we have a "mental immune response" so to speak and can actively reject the idea we come across. Or accept them.

I was focusing more on the point that any idea we come across must invariably be processed and dealt with in the sense that "one cannot unsee what they have just seen".

The concern here is between passive attention and active conscious decision making. I am suggesting that if we are unaware that viral ideas may affect us, if we do not maintain alertness to them, it is possible we will unintentionally assimilate the idea and allow it to warp our views. Thus there is am importance to maintaining a certain level of active critical approach.

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."