Viral content such as memes, songs, tweets, and videos really are the modern day plague.

A team of researchers who set out to learn how social internet phenomenons spread like wildfire discovered the dispersion mimics the infectious diseases of the middle ages.

The team from Eotvos University in Budapest discovered that, like the the plague, memes begin at a specific place and time, and because they transfer person-to-person, follow a ‘wavelike spreading pattern.’

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Geo-locations of Twitter messages containing ‘Gangnam Style’ showed how social internet phenomenons spread like wildfire discovered the dispersion mimics the infectious diseases of the middle ages

This wavelike form of spreading seemingly vanished in the 20th century when air travel suddenly allowed diseases to jump continents – but the researchers say internet content is the modern day example of epidemics like the Black Death, which traveled across Europe at about two kilometers a day killing between 35 and 200 million.

‘Our assumption is that only those online viral phenomena can show similarities to global pandemics that were originally constrained to a well localized, limited region and then, after an outbreak period reached a worldwide level of penetration, the researchers wrote in their paper, titled ‘Video Pandemics: Worldwide Viral Spreading of Psy’s Gangnam Style Video.’

This wavelike form of spreading seemingly vanished in the 20th century – but the researchers say internet content is the modern day example of epidemics like the Black Death, which traveled across Europe at about two kilometers a day killing between 35 and 200 million

The spread of information is distorted by social media networks, which raises the question of whether it is really wavelike or fundamentally different – so to solve the mystery, they tracked the spread of the video by searching the historical Twitter stream for geolocated tweets that mention ‘Gangnam Style.’

‘Location information allows us to record the approximate arrival time of a certain news to a specific geo-political region,’ the paper reads.

‘In the real space this process looks indeed random, but the ‘local to global’ transition is also apparent as the messages cover a progressively larger territory.’

The data shows that after immediately becoming popular in Psy’s home country of South Korea, the video spread nearby to the Philippines.

The spread thereafter looks random, but that’s because ‘effectiveness distance’ – or the strength of links from one area to another – is they key factor rather than ‘geographic distance’.

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‘Location information allows us to record the approximate arrival time of a certain news to a specific geo-political region,’ the paper reads, saying the seemingly random ‘local to global’ transition becomes apparent as the messages cover a progressively larger territory

When ‘Gangnam Style’ hit the Phillippnes, for example, it was able to begin spreading more quickly because it has stronger links to the rest of the world and deeper English language links

When ‘Gangnam Style’ hit the Phillippnes, for example, it was able to begin spreading more quickly because it has stronger links to the rest of the world and deeper English language links.

When the team crosschecked their results by searching Google Trends to see when people first searched for the term ‘Gangnam Style’  in different parts of the world., the results matched the Twitter finds exactly.