Cognitive anthropology / cultural evolution / digital media / cultural analytics. Assistant professor sociology @UniTrento - more info in the pinned tweet.
...in a way, its success is itself an example of what the plot is about (i.e., negative info is culturally palatable). Not sure if the trends would have been the other way around it would be the same...
It starts discussing the concept of “meme” (not surprisingly, giving the topic of the book…) and why cultural evolutionists tend to be sceptical of the idea of replicators in cultural evolution 2/8 
It is a *long* chapter about the spread of online misinformation, broadly intended as factually incorrect claims. I first discuss various reasons why misinformation could be favoured online. 2/8
The existence of online echo chambers is consistent with psychological tendencies such as myside bias (search for, and preferentially accept, arguments that confirm our pre-existent positions), or similarity bias (copying from people similar to us). 2/8
After cues related to prestige (chapter 3), we move to popularity. The popularity of everything online is long-tailed, with few big winners and many not-su-much. 2/7 
I explore prestige bias in cultural evolution. How do we decide from whom to copy from? One can observe to whom other people show signs of deference or respect, or simply whom they tend to hang around more, and copy from them. 2/7
I start to dig properly into cultural evolution. The digital age produces an enormous amount of data on human behaviour, and this obviously attracted a lot of research. But computational social science needs to be also theory-rich. 2/7
The title says pretty much what it is about. It starts discussing research inspired by social brain hypothesis. Once we avoid overly simplistic interpretations (“you can have only 150 friends!”), the idea that there are limits to the size of our social networks is reasonable. 2/7