Virality

Over the course of the next few months we’ll be treating this newsletter more like a Substack, sharing drafts from Chand and Ethan’s forthcoming book “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year with MIT Press.

Do you have thoughts about this chapter? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Social media makes it possible for a piece of content to rapidly spread to millions of people in a matter of hours. In fact, “going viral” may be the defining phenomenon of the digital public sphere.

Justine Sacco was flying from New York to South Africa to see family over the holidays in 2013 when she fired off a series of travel jokes to her 170 followers on Twitter. She posted the last one, an off-color attempt to make fun of the privileged bubble many in the first-world occupy (“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”), right before boarding her 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town.

When she landed and turned on her phone, it was blowing up. While she was in the air, her post had gone viral, spreading from her 170 followers to millions of people worldwide, eventually becoming the number one trending topic on Twitter. People were outraged by her apparent racism. Sacco, a white South African whose family has long been involved in progressive politics and anti-apartheid activism, assumed her comments would be read as dark humor by people who knew her. But once her tweet went viral, that context was lost. As a result of going viral, Sacco had to cut her trip short (hotels couldn’t guarantee her safety) and she was fired from her job.

Going viral doesn’t have to be negative. (Though it’s easier for negativity to go viral thanks to human psychology.) All kinds of content, from the mundane to the heartwarming, go viral as well. The digital public sphere is an unprecedented engine for spreading content fast and far.

Virality’s prominent role in the public sphere is one of the most important effects of the rise of social media. Before social media, in order for content to reach a huge audience and dominate public discourse, it had to go through various media gatekeepers who decided whether or not to highlight it to their audiences. This power to direct the public’s attention is called “agenda-setting” and it was previously a largely top-down process. Now, social media, through virality, makes it possible for anyone, anywhere to reach a huge audience and dominate public discourse. Agenda-setting has become more of a bottom-up process. For example, the White House now briefs prominent influencers on major legislation, recognizing their critical role in amplifying messages. This shift is destabilizing for legacy institutions from media to government, which have long counted on controlling the agenda-setting process. It’s also destabilizing more broadly. Virality is inherently unstable—even creators with large followings on social media find that going viral is a constant struggle. Nothing is guaranteed, even with large follower counts, as each piece of content must meet the fickle requirements for virality independently. This means that the agenda is always up for grabs—no one and nothing can claim it for long. It also likely exacerbates the trend toward shorter attention spans and news cycles.

What makes something go viral?

It’s complicated. However, we can outline a few key factors affecting virality: audiences, affordances, algorithms, and crossover. Viral content needs to be popular with audiences, which means it typically has broad appeal and evokes strong emotions. Virality is also affected by a platform’s affordances. For example, if a platform has native share functionality (e.g., retweets), content is more likely to go viral as it’s easier to spread content. Similarly, if recommendations are frequently and prominently displayed to users, content is more likely to go viral—recommendations make it easier for content to spread across social graphs. Further, virality is affected by algorithms. What an algorithm prioritizes plays a significant role in determining what goes viral: if a piece of content is prioritized by an algorithm, it’s more likely to show up in feeds and is thus more likely to spread, and vice versa. Finally, virality is affected by cross-platform and cross-media flows—crossover. For example, whether a piece of content is highlighted by legacy media or spreads on another platform affects whether it goes viral.

In sum, the importance of the shift in agenda-setting from gatekeepers to virality is difficult to overstate. It is key to understanding the effects of social media. Arguably, the biggest lever for influencing public discourse is no longer a feature in a national newspaper or on broadcast television—it’s going viral. Understanding the factors that affect virality—such as audiences, affordances, algorithms, and crossover—can help illuminate this critical dynamic.

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See Algorithms, Memes, Popularity, Context Collapse, Manipulation, Misinformation