Viral media artifacts utilize specific mimetic strategies in order to gain approval, trust, conversion of agents, survival resources and distribution in people’s social activity and networks.

The primary advertisement to the hosts is accomplished through the mimicry of characteristics that deeply activate emotional and ethical responses. These objects have been engineered to appear:

Helpful, beautiful, heroic, protective, preventative, righteous, heartful, frightening, upsetting, or unbearable.

By producing responses in viewers, the media co-opts the response and converts the viewer to its agent of propagation.

The strategy is mimetic because the actual payload is not the value promised by the masquerade. The actual payload is parasitic, and co-opts the perception and activity of the target for purposes unrelated to the advertisement, and, most often, harmful to both the host and its communications contexts.