Time to bust out the old "Can't tell if this MP3 is a steganographically important encrypted file or just a Nurse With Wound EP" trick then.
And my mother would duly sift through these forwarded meme images for the dankest of the dank, and then she would eagerly forward them to her friend from church, who also had a large distribution list, and so that is how I became a conduit for the dankest GenZ Facebook memes to the boomer generations in another state.
And then I became a Cybersecurity educator, and our curriculum contained a module on steganography, and we all had the students do a proof-of-concept where they cryptographically embedded secret messages in innocent-looking photograph files.
And that is where my meme-sharing came to a screeching halt, and I deleted every meme I ever collected, and I unsubbed from every possible source, and I began completely ignoring memes, and my mother's distribution dried up. Good god that was absolutely shocking. I have no idea what sort, if any, secret messages I was responsible for, and I hope that we never ever find out!
The risk, of becoming a mule, an unwitting accessory to some evil cause, was just far outweighing the rewards of sharing dumb crap with my mother, you know?
Normally would not comment just to make fun of someone but this is just a wild take, how could you be sure that HN is not full of coded messages?
If your pastime involved trading envelopes with other collectors of envelopes, and you started passing along a bunch of sealed envelopes with unknown contents, how would you feel? Or if you enjoyed well-constructed cartons, and you found yourself trafficking in sealed cartons with unknown contents? That would basically make you a shipping, receiving, and logistics provider. Anything at all could be in those parcels. Why do it? Why open up to risk?
The main point here is that there was no point to my trading in memes. It was recreation; it was optional; it was totally a lark with my boomer mom and her audience. I had no reason to look at these memes and I had no reason to forward them on. Sure, the risk was very, very low that anyone "evil" was encoding "secret messages" or "targeting" anyone I knew. But since I had no reason to engage in this activity in the first place, why not quit? Why not just distance myself? Thereby removing 100% of the risk.
I don't agree with you at all, nor do I understand how your mind works, but I very much appreciate you taking the time to respond and respect your commitment not to facilitate anything nefarious even though we disagree.