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A 119-Word Local Crime Brief Became Facebook’s Most-Shared Story of 2019
- bradleybuda 8y agoTLDR: the headline was “human trafficking [...] in ‘our area’”, which when shared virally sounds like it’s in everyone’s area. In case you didn’t want to wade through 20 paragraphs of boilerplate about social news sharing before getting to the obvious punchline.
- danso 8y agoThe story brings up other possible factors too, such as the nature of the engagement and the types of users (individual, as opposed to publishers) who were re-sharing it. Sensational headline alone isn't an end-all explanation for why a brief from a radio station w/ 7,000 followers would go viral.
- russellbeattie 8y agoThere's a certain 47% of the country which loves to share news articles like this to make sure they let everyone they know that the country is going to hell, and that we better lock up more brown people, and give authoritarians more power to make it great again. And there's also another set of people, who may or may not be employed by a hostile government, who like to take advantage of this by sharing as many of these stories as possible. The end result isn't that surprising. Once FB's algorithms see something like that is popular in one group, it follows the graph to the next group out, and shares it with them. The rabid, uncritical 47% of that group shares it, and the algorithm jumps out to another layer. Rinse and repeat.
- isoskeles 8y agoIs that the same rabid, uncritical 47% who spent the last couple of years screaming about Russian collusion? I wonder what slate.com has to say about that.
- greesil 8y agoInteresting that your account's created date is just before the 2016 election.
- dang 8y agoPlease do not break the site guidelines against insinuating astroturfing. This rule is becoming more important on HN. Plenty of explanation for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- akhilcacharya 8y agoThis is a goal post move. I remember when this 47% was claiming Seth Rich was the DNC leaker. I think the media did a pretty good job describing the facts of the SCO investigation.
- dang 8y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html p.s. Also, please note the guideline about not calling names (e.g. "rabid").
- mywittyname 8y agoJohn Mulaney has a skit in his I'm New In Town special that I think sums this phenomenon up. > there’s a hierarchy in the New York Post [...] different people that they don’t like. [...]And if you pay attention, you can start to identify some of the rankings that they have. > [...]Um, the number one thing that you can be in the eyes of the New York Post is an angel. An angel is a child who has died. That is the best thing that you can be in the eyes of the New York Post. > [...]Down towards the bottom of the spectrum, there are pervs. Pervs touch tots People are drawn to news about "bad guys" and for some reason, sexual predators seem to be the most compelling kid of bad guy. Which likely also explains their popularity in crime drama plots.
- Bartweiss 8y agoThere were some pretty interesting things in the sharing patterns, which probably warrant more analysis. (Short version: the post produced lots of comments, lots of users directly tagging one another, and a high "user share" to "site/brand share" ratio.) At a glance, all of those things imply that in addition to rewarding personal/organic discussion, Facebook is implicitly rewarding inflammatory, false, or satirical stories; scary crime stories and outrageous jokes are the sort of things that make people tag each other instead of just liking a post. I'm irritated, though, that the article can't offer any support for any of those claims. I understand that Facebook isn't forthcoming about their algorithms, but there are several hints that this piece is trying to build a "scary evil social media" narrative rather than simply seeking answers. In particular, the line "While no sources I talked to suggested this..." looks like journalistic shorthand for "No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get a sourced quote with which to claim that..." This story is definitely more interesting than a simple clickbait headline, but I'm reluctant to trust the specific theories on offer here.
- Derelicts 8y agoThe headline definitely is an important element in the success of this story.
- iambateman 8y agoI wonder how much of a factor randomness was... It’s the social media equivalent of winning the lottery...somebody is going to win, and trying to explain why a particular post went uber-viral may by futile.
- naniwaduni 8y agoUnlike certain kinds of lottery, there's no reason to assume that "somebody is going to win".
- wahern 8y agoFacebook? Slate? AFAIU, advertisement margins don't scale linearly with popularity, so viral content probably brings in more money even if the total number and exposure time of advertisement impressions remains constant in the aggregate.
- NikkiA 8y agoWhat? There has to be a 'most shared story', so something does have to win, unless you're going to get nitpicky about 2 stories that each had 49,994 shares or something.
- naniwaduni 8y agoIt is perfectly conceivable for no particular stories to have much nonlocal impact, with nothing going viral. Sure, there'll be a 'most shared story', but that doesn't need to be a meaningful position.
- kevinwang 8y agoCan anyone link to the original fb post? I'd love to see what caption people used when sharing it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kartan 8y ago"By clicking “Agree,” you consent to Slate’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners to deliver relevant advertising on our site, in emails and across the Internet, to personalize content and perform site analytics. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information about our use of data, your rights, and how to withdraw consent." No thank you.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 8y agoThat one didn't bother me as much as Oath's, which includes: > ... We (Oath) and our partners need your consent to access your device, set cookies, and use your data, including your location, to understand your interests, provide relevant ads and measure their effectiveness. ... I mean "access your device" and "including your location"? But maybe they're just being more honest about it all than Slate is.
- jfk13 8y agoWell, if you actually read Slate's "privacy policy", it's pretty horrific too. It lists vast amounts of data they collect, both personal and (what they consider to be) non-personal (which can include your geolocation and browser fingerprint, apparently), and lots of ways they use it and share it; but it's not at all clear how I'd be able to opt out of having them track me, share my history with all their favourite partners, etc. There's no way simply reading an article creates a "legitimate need" for all that.
- mirimir 8y agoYeah, I should have expected that :( > ... but it's not at all clear how I'd be able to opt out of having them track me, share my history with all their favourite partners, etc. Actually, Slate seems quite accessible via Tor. So that's an option. But I don't use HN via Tor, so switching to a Whonix VM just to read stuff, with no shared clipboard, would be painful. And as well, I don't like creating correlations, so I wouldn't want to use a Whonix VM that I used for actual work. > There's no way simply reading an article creates a "legitimate need" for all that. I totally agree.
- chapium 8y agoOT: I think it's interesting that to illustrate viral sharing on facebook a share button is surrounded by a hundred mouse pointers. Will the mouse pointer be the next floppy disk save icon? Considering how much of facebook comes from touch screen users, the mouse pointers seem a bit antiquated.
- imgabe 8y agoI think it's just the vagueness of the headline. "Our Area" could be any area, so everyone who saw it wanted pass it along because they thought it applied to them.
- dmckeon 8y agoNewspaper stories used to have a “dateline” which gave the place-of-origin and the date the story was written, usually followed by the writer’s name. The AP style guide had detailed rules, abbreviations, and even disambiguation - which Portland, which Springfield? Nowadays, TV and newspaper web sites frequently make no mention of the date of a story, and the location is rarely given. Worse, the geographic area served by the medium is often maddeningly vague, with general hints like serving “the five valley area”, or “the gateway to the Snake Navel river,” or “the tri-county rural-plex”. Those are nice for the local readers and the advertisers/chamber of commerce, but for the random remote internet reader they convey almost no useful location information. Please, old-media web-site admins, put your medium’s location somewhere close to the top of your home page. A state or province, a town, or even an area-code. Also, get off my lawn.
- imgabe 8y agoIt looks like the original headline was “Texas Rangers Search Here for Human Trafficking Suspect” which would have at least suggested that it was taking place somewhere in Texas. The radio news reporter that reposted it just changed it to “Suspected Human Trafficker, Child Predator May Be in Our Area."
- ComputerGuru 8y ago> Newspaper stories used to have a “dateline” which gave the place-of-origin and the date the story was written, usually followed by the writer’s name. Actually, the dateline is far more important than that. I didn't always know this, but the dateline is actually a contract telling you where the reporter was in person, and is the difference between the "hard" journalism of yesteryear and the "soft" web journalism of today. Read this investigation [0] by the NY Times into the story of Jayson Blair, whom they fired after discovering he was faking sources for his articles. It talks a lot about journalistic integrity and was the first time I learned that datelines weren't just where the article happened but also the journalist giving you their word that they were there, on the ground. Once you learn this, you start to see it everywhere. For instance, a recent article about the deep freeze we had here in Chicago (we hit around minus 50 degrees F with windchill for a couple of days) talked almost exclusively about Chicago, a little bit about the Midwest in general, and a single sentence towards the end about Michigan. The byline? Detroit, MI. Now you know why! [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/times-reporter-who-resigned-leaves-long-trail-of-deception.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/national/times-reporter-w...
- tomphoolery 8y agoA bunch of pro-trump groups sharing a story about a "bad brown person" isn't exactly news to me. The author of this article is clearly very old and/or out-of-touch with what is happening in America right now.