GAS ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS IN SYRIA, SECRET CIA FILES ON American backing for Saddam Hussein, Ben Affleck being cast as Batman and Miley Cyrus twerking were among the most shared stories in August 2013. Every day, a mix of the serious, the surprising, the shocking and the sexy spreads across social networks.
News about the situation unfolding in Syria was consistently among the more shared stories in August 2013. In the week after the August 21 chemical attack, more information emerged about the use of the nerve agent Sarin. Online images showed adults and children struggling to breathe, frothing at the mouth and convulsing on the ground. Outrage at the tragedy led more and more people to tell others about what had happened in Syria.
The reaction to the attack in Syria is an example of how emotions drive sharing. As more details surfaced about what had happened, so did the number of people spreading the news. Emotions play a vital part in the social transmission of news and information. Interest, happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger, fear and contempt affect how some stories catch on and travel far wider than others. The news that Ben Affleck was to be the next Batman became a huge talking point as fans expressed surprise, shock and horror. “Holy smokes! Affleck?” summed up the reaction of many. Variety’s story on the casting was shared on Twitter by more than 14,000 users and attracted almost 100,000 comments on Facebook.
When we pass on a story, be it disturbing news from Syria or Affleck as Batman, we are replicating what we already do in everyday conversations. Most of our exchanges fall into what is called social talk. In conversation, we share details about our personal activities, indulge in gossip, highlight something in the news or relate far-fetched stories that make up urban legends. An exchange of information takes place. Our purpose is to let others know what we know, perhaps help them understand a complex situation or share useful practical advice. A story about traffic conditions could help drivers save time during the morning commute. We can appear well-informed and knowledgeable by telling colleagues about the latest trends in our industry. Or entertaining by passing on an amusing song we found online. Behind our actions are emotional drivers that underpin the social transmission of news and information. We may think we are making rational choices, but underlying our actions is an emotional response to the news.
News editors have long understood how to use emotions to capture the attention of a busy audience. In journalism, the true skill lies not in knowing what to write about but in deciding which of the millions of events taking place every day across the planet to ignore. Only the “news that’s fit to print” makes it to the page. New Yorkers caught their first glimpse of this famous phrase in American journalism in October 1896. The red sign in Madison Square that read ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT was the advertising slogan for an ailing New York newspaper. It was the brainchild of Adolph S. Ochs, a thirty-eight-year-old publisher who had started his newspaper career as an office boy and printing apprentice in Knoxville, Tennessee. He had made a name for himself by taking a bankrupt small-town newspaper in 1878 and turning it into one of the most influential dailies in the South. Almost twenty years later, he did the same for another ailing newspaper, The New York Times.
When Ochs acquired that paper on August 18, 1896, for $75,000, the phrase was part of a strategy to reverse the fortunes of a paper that was selling only 9,000 of the 19,000 copies printed each day, was losing $1,000 a day and carried debts totalling $300,000. Ochs hoped the slogan would help to set the Times apart from the more popular and sensational papers in the city by signalling that it was going to be far more selective in what it covered. What started as an advertising slogan became a leitmotif for the Times, encapsulating its commitment to journalistic integrity. The front page of the newspaper still carries the seven words, which first appeared in print in 1897.
The emotional impact of a story is one of the values that shapes news coverage. News values are the not-so-secret sauce that journalists use to evaluate the elements that come together to make a good story. As well as emotion, editors assess impact, weight, controversy, the unusual, prominence, proximity, timeliness, currency, usefulness and educational value. Journalists use news values as a framework to estimate the level of interest in a potential story. During the four years I edited the front page of the BBC News website, I would aim for a balance of the most important developments in the U.K. and abroad, with reports from the world of health and science, together with a dash of entertainment and things that were just plain weird.
If Ochs were alive today, he might have fashioned the slogan as “All the news that’s fit to share.” In 2010, readers were sending out a link to a New York Times story on Twitter every four seconds. It is hard to visit a news website without stumbling across calls to tweet this article or recommend that video. Media organizations are aware that one of the best ways of getting their stories out there is by word of mouth, as social media becomes an extension of the office water cooler. Personal recommendation is an increasingly important source of readers for news websites. By 2010, almost half of all people online in the U.S. were passing along links to news stories or videos.
The trend for social recommendation has been gathering pace as platforms such as Facebook have evolved into marketplaces for the spread of news, information and ideas. Facebook alone accounted for about one in every ten readers visiting a news website such as HuffingtonPost.com in 2011. For The New York Times, about 6 per cent of its readers found their way to the site through links posted by friends on Facebook. By January 2014, the official Times page on the social network had been “liked” by almost 5.2 million people, up from 2.5 million in November 2012. Digital sharing is part of the fabric of news in modern society. Publications such as The Times offer a myriad of ways for readers to tell their friends about a story they saw online. But what the audience decides are the important stories of the day does not necessarily mesh with the decisions of experienced news editors who select all the news that is fit to print.
On news websites, there is usually some overlap between the top news items of the day and the list of most shared stories. But the most read items aren’t always the most shared. The news that’s fit to print isn’t always the news that’s fit to share. It points to the divergence between the stories we consume and those we share. Readers tend to spread the most distinctive and unusual stories, as well as the big news of the day. How a story makes us feel plays a vital role in triggering our desire to tell others about it. When Wharton business professors Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman studied the most emailed stories from The New York Times, they found that news and information that provoked an emotional reaction was 20 per cent more likely to be widely shared than more neutral stories. Similarly, a British study found that news about disasters and death, quirky stories or provocative columns were among the most shared types of stories at five big U.K. news organizations. The most shared items tended to evoke emotions of shock, amusement or surprise. Interest alone was not enough to explain why the stories were spread by the public. The stories that pop up on social networks are about “mood and the way a story makes you feel,” concluded the former editor of The Guardian website, Janine Gibson.
People are far more likely to share details of everyday personal things that provoke a strong emotional response. Sentiment also comes into play when talking about other aspects of life. We are more likely to tell a friend after seeing a particularly moving film or after hearing shocking news, such as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. As social animals, we are engineered to share news. By studying the stories that people choose to pass on to others by email or Facebook, researchers are discovering how fear, sadness, happiness, anger and disgust affect how news spreads. Making an emotional connection serves as a catalyst for sharing. The key is in understanding the reactions that spark social transmission. The difference between emotions that increase or decrease sharing is physiological arousal. The emotions that trigger a response lend themselves to being shared more than others.
On the night of November 6, 2012, millions of Americans were on the edge of their seats. One of the most closely fought elections for the White House was coming to an end, as polling stations closed and votes were counted. America’s first black president, Barack Hussein Obama, was hoping for a second term. Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, was the man trying to unseat him. After months of arduous campaigning, millions of dollars spent on political messages and three robust televised debates, the election seemed too close to call.
For Obama supporters, relief came shortly, at 11:15 Ρ·Μ Eastern. It came in the form of a post on Obama’s official Facebook and Twitter accounts, some two hours before he gave his formal victory speech. The message carried a photograph of the president hugging his wife, his sleeves rolled up and eyes closed, framed against grey clouds in the background, with the caption FOUR MORE YEARS. The photo dated to a campaign stop at Dubuque, Iowa, on August 15. It quickly set a new record for the most shared post in the history of social media. In less than twenty-four hours, almost four million people clicked to “like” the photo and more than 500,000 people shared it on their own Facebook pages. On Twitter, it was passed on more than 750,000 times.
The photo of the hug struck a chord with supporters, both in the U.S. and abroad. By sharing the message, they were stating their political views and associating their online identity with the Obamas’. As explored in Chapter 2, people tend to manage their presence online and express a particular persona through the material shared with others. The Obama tweet was the trigger for emotions of joy—and, to some degree, relief—among supporters hoping for four more years. After a seemingly never-ending presidential campaign, they were primed to share positive news signalling the end.
The impact of the message went beyond the words about the result of the election. The accompanying photo conveyed the ideal image of the president as a man who, to supporters, symbolized hope, loyalty and family. The photo captured a key emotion that drives communication: happiness. By forwarding the photo, individuals were sharing the joy of the Obamas with their loved ones, friends and colleagues. Social networks allowed individuals to feel part of something bigger than themselves and participate in a collective expression of delight at Obama’s victory. Four years earlier, the Obama camp had scored a similar viral victory with its Yes We Can video. The message of hope and change became the most popular online video of the 2008 campaign, with more than twenty million views.
Happiness is one of the most influential drivers of sharing. It is a positive emotion that we want to share with the world. It explains the popularity of funny videos like the famous Charlie Bit My Finger from 2007, one of the most watched videos on YouTube. In six years, the video of a one-year-old biting the finger of his three-year-old brother had racked up more than 500 million views. The most widely shared videos are not simply amusing. They are exhilarating, hilarious, astonishing or uplifting. The secret to their success is their ability to trigger a positive physiological response, making us laugh or squeal with joy. Such videos are shared 30 per cent more on average than others.
The power of emotion to override a more rational assessment became clear in the early days of the Internet. In the late 1990s, an email supposedly from Microsoft founder Bill Gates was one of the things many felt compelled to pass on. The message explained that Gates was trying out a new email tracing program. It asked people to forward the message to everyone they knew, promising $1,000 if the email reached a thousand people. The message was started as a joke by software programmer Bryan Mack in 1997. It was widely shared, spawned numerous versions over the years and remains one of the top ten Internet hoaxes.
A letter from Bill Gates offering $1,000 for clicking on the Forward button sounds too good to be true. Many thought that, but still felt compelled to share their apparent good fortune. “I have ab-so-smurfly no clue as to if this is a farce or not, but believe in it or not, the prospect of an extra grand is enticing,” wrote one person. The Gates hoax highlights the power of happiness as a driver for social transmission, even if we have doubts about the authenticity of the message.
The structure of social networking sites works to reinforce upbeat feelings. Ever wonder why there is no Dislike button on Facebook? It is structured to encourage a positive emotional environment. And the plan works. Most people feel good about themselves when they spend time on such social networks. We tend to be connected to people we know, rather than strangers. It means we are more likely to forward feel-good, amusing or awe-inspiring stories, because we want our friends to experience the same vicarious delight we did.
A doctoral student at Michigan State University, Sonya Song, dug further into the phenomenon of Facebook sharing when she was a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at The Boston Globe in 2013. She analyzed 215 stories posted on the Globe’s Facebook page over a two-week period. Among the pieces that spurred the most conversation was a photo gallery marking the return of two swans that take up residence at the Boston Public Garden during the summer and a “miracle” win by the Bruins against the Toronto Maple Leafs. Both are feel-good stories. In contrast, factual stories devoid of emotion failed to get much traction on Facebook.
While traditional media gives space to bad news, social transmission favours positive news. Even for discerning readers of The New York Times, the more positive a story, the more likely readers are to email it to a friend. It means we are less likely to stumble across a story that is potentially important but lacking emotion on social networks. Television is still the leading source of news for most, but it is on the decline as people are increasingly turning to the Internet and social networks. By 2012, 20 per cent of Americans were regularly getting some of their news from a social networking site, up from just 2 per cent in 2008. For young people, the number is up to a third. The prognosis could be a news diet of beautiful sunset photos or cute cats. But it’s not quite that banal. News that stirs negative emotions does spread. It just has to be the right kind of negative emotion in the appropriate context.
Say a friend mentioned that she had raised enough money from running a marathon to sponsor expensive eye surgery for an Indian child. Another friend then said he had just been told he had a congenital eye disorder and would probably be blind in five years. Chances are, you would share both anecdotes with others. Both examples provoke strong emotions—happiness in the case of the marathon runner and sadness for the friend with the eye condition. But one of the stories would be passed on more than the other. According to psychology researchers from the U.K., Australia and the Netherlands, it would be the anecdote of the marathon runner. It is a feel-good story. The eye story is a heartbreaking, tragic story without a happy ending. Nobody wants to be like Saturday Night Live’s Debbie Downer. (“You’re enjoying your day. Everything’s going your way. Then along comes Debbie Downer.”)
Professors Berger and Milkman at the Wharton School found that sadness affected which stories readers of The New York Times shared. They analyzed thousands of articles that made the “most emailed” list on the Times’s website over three months, taking into account factors that would influence a story’s popularity, such as its prominence on the website, the gender of the writer, or the story’s length. Sad stories, such as President Obama mourning the passing of his grandmother or the suicide of a Korean actress, were far less popular than an upbeat account of a play telling the story of newcomers to New York City who fall in love.
The more depressing the story, the less likely we are to want to tell others about it. With happiness, intensity fuels sharing; sadness triggers the opposite response. The Penn professors tested the idea by exposing their students to two different news articles about people recovering from injuries. One was the heartbreaking story of a person maimed in the 9/11 attacks. The other was about a person recovering after a fall down the stairs. The students were reluctant to pass on the story about the 9/11 victim, even though it had a much greater emotional impact.
Yet sad stories can go viral if they are presented in the appropriate context. In January 2014, the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported on a thirty-three-year-old mother dying of cancer who would never get to see her toddler grow up. At first glance, it seems to be a depressing tale of loss. But visitors to the Daily Mail’s website shared the story almost four thousand times. The key difference was the framing of the story: the article focused on how the mother, Rowena, was leaving a legacy for her son by writing cards to celebrate his birthdays up to age twenty-one, as well as cards for his first day at school, his graduation and his wedding. The article framed Rowena’s story as one about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity. It was designed to leave readers feeling inspired, rather than dejected.
Media outlets are getting smart about framing stories that involve a problem but also have some kind of positive outcome. Sonya Song spotted the trend in the most conversational stories posted to Facebook by The Boston Globe. People shared stories about runners who, having failed to finish the Boston Marathon after the bombings in 2013, had been invited back to complete the race. Or about a child saved after a natural disaster. We seem to be suckers for a happy ending. Websites that make a virtue of generating buzz around their stories, such as Upworthy and Viral Nova, have become skilled in coming up with headlines that turn a sad tale on its head. On Viral Nova, Rowena’s story was headlined: “Her Little Boy Has No Idea His Mother Is About to Die. What She’s Doing About That Is Amazing.” As well as piquing curiosity, it primes a reader to tell a friend about such a moving story. Shifting the focus away from sadness changes a story’s emotional footprint, helping it travel further on social networks.
The old adage in news is that if it bleeds, it leads. On any evening newscast, there never seems to be a shortage of murders, shootings or traffic accidents. Crime appears to be everywhere, and the more unusual and violent the crime, the more coverage it gets. Crime reporting has long been a media staple: bad news sells, while good news is no news. The coverage seeks to grab our attention by tapping into the emotion of fear. A newspaper headline warning of “stranger danger” is designed to lure more people to buy the paper. TV anchors going on about a gangland shooting are trying to stop viewers from switching channels.
Fear is visceral, instinctual. It is a reaction to danger that serves as a survival mechanism. In a socially hostile situation—say, someone being aggressive at a bar—most people will try to extricate and protect themselves. They see a threat, assess it and react to it. But we are lousy at accurately evaluating risk, because fear works on an emotional, rather than rational, level. Take the public perception of crime. Most Americans believe violent crime has been increasing over the past decade. The truth, though, is that violent crime has been on a downward trend since 1994.
While fear has long been used to sell newspapers and boost TV ratings, it is not an emotion we share readily with others. Fear can be a powerful motivator for action, but for not sharing. Researchers Kim Peters, Yoshima Kashima and Anna Clark tested the idea with Australian university students to see how they would deal with frightful anecdotes about college life. They found that the students were unlikely to pass on a story about a random beating of a fellow student. While bad news is a mainstay of the media, people tend to avoid passing on information that makes others feel badly or fearful.
As a general rule, fear tends to diminish the desire to share. But there are situations when we deliberately take on the role of Debbie Downer. When Stanford University professor Chip Heath was at the University of Chicago in the 1990s, he was curious about whether people had a preference for good or bad news. He put the idea to the test by seeing how willing undergraduate students were to tell others about muggings in the Hyde Park neighbourhood the university occupies. The results contradicted the general belief that people shy away from passing on bad news. The students consistently chose to share bad news about muggings, even though it might trigger emotions of fear among friends.
The difference here is the context for these conversations. At the time, muggings were a common topic of conversation for the residents of Hyde Park. Since the topic was already commonplace, students would have felt less inhibited about sharing their fear. In such situations, there is a social good at play. Telling others about the level of muggings is a way of warning them of the dangers of crime in the area. It shows that there are times when spreading fear is helping the community, if the context is right. But as a general rule, fear is not a negative emotion we want to provoke in others, in much the same way we don’t want to share sadness. However, there is one negative emotion that inspires action—and that is anger.
The tale of Dave Carroll, his broken guitar and United Airlines has become legend as to what can happen to a company’s reputation in the age of social media. The Canadian musician became an Internet sensation in 2009 along with his song, “United Breaks Guitars.” Carroll wrote the song to vent his frustration with customer service at United Airlines after his $3,500 Taylor acoustic guitar was broken on a flight with the airline. The music video poking fun at United went viral on YouTube (at the time of this writing, it has been viewed almost fourteen million times).
The song struck a chord with people who passed it on to their friends. Carroll went from being an obscure country-and-western singer from Timmins, Ontario, to a YouTube celebrity. It was a public relations nightmare for United, one that affected the company’s share price. United finally paid attention to Carroll, offering him the cost of repairs to his guitar and flight vouchers for his trouble.
One of the reasons the story of Carroll and his broken guitar resonated with the public is that we all have our story of a flight from hell. There is even a website called FlightsfromHell.com, where travellers are encouraged to share the trials and tribulations of air travel.
Such tales trigger emotional arousal. They make us seethe with frustration. We are all prone to react to anger. In their study of The New York Times, Berger and Milkman discovered that readers were drawn to pass on stories that stirred an angry response. Among the stories that left readers fuming were reports on big bonuses paid to Wall Street executives at a time of financial crisis and about an adviser to Senator John McCain receiving nearly $2 million from a major loans firm. Anger made a news piece more viral. And the more it incited a passionate reaction, the better. The Wharton professors calculated that the odds of a story being shared would increase by 34 per cent if it were written in such a way as to incense readers.
Harnessed in the right way, a negative emotion like anger can fuel social transmission. The way a story is presented can make all the difference. The Wharton researchers tested two versions of the Carroll story to see which one resonated the most with readers. One story, headlined “United Dents Guitars,” said the airline was willing to pay for the damage caused by baggage handlers dropping the guitar. The other version, headlined “United Smashes Guitars,” said baggage handlers were indifferent in handling the guitars and that the airline was loath to pay damages. The second version was designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction—and, unsurprisingly, it made people more likely to tell others.
Anger is a negative emotion, yet it can be used effectively to incite action if it spurs an emotional response. Part of the success of the Kony 2012 video produced by Invisible Children was due to the sense of moral outrage it provoked in viewers. As well as making people angry, it directed those feelings at the villain of the piece, Joseph Kony. Research shows people are far more likely to share such material if it doesn’t involve their own social circle. Instead, they forward it to like-minded friends who would have a similar reaction. The effect is to strengthen social bonds in a group through a communal expression of aversion to the acts of another. When anger tips over into disgust, the urge to share becomes even more powerful.
Most people will have heard a version of the story about the rat served instead of chicken. In one of the most popular accounts, a woman is eating Kentucky Fried Chicken as she watches TV at home when she notices it tastes odd. Turning up the lights, she sees it isn’t chicken, but a rat with extra-crispy coating. A kid working at KFC had fried it as a prank. Or so the story goes. The Kentucky Fried Rat yarn has become one of the more widely known and persistent urban legends. By 1980, more than a hundred versions of the tale were in circulation in the U.S. alone.
The combination of eating something inappropriate and unsuitable contact with animals is irresistible. The yuckiness of a story contributes to its appeal. The persistence of the Kentucky Fried Rat story helps to explain why some material spreads rapidly online. At the core is the emotion of disgust. It may seem odd that such a negative emotion would be one that people want to share. But disgust is a surprisingly powerful motivation for sharing.
Researchers Chip Heath, Chris Bell and Emily Sternberg decided to test how far people would go in passing on disgusting anecdotes, no matter how far-fetched. They chose twelve disgusting urban legends and altered them to be either more or less revolting. In one example, the story of a man finding a dead rat at the bottom of his glass of soda was made more nauseating by having him ingest bits of the animal. The less repulsive version had the man notice a bad smell and spot the rat before drinking the soda. The results showed that people were far more likely to share the most disgusting account of a story, even if the tale was truly repulsive. The researchers found similar results when they looked at the most popular stories on websites that specialized in urban legends. The more disgusting a story, the more likely it was to be distributed online.
There is a science to grossness. Psychologists who have studied why some things, actions and people elicit feelings of repulsion point to several key elements. They come together to provoke a reaction of disgust. There is the inappropriate use of food, such as the Subway employee who shared a picture of himself with his penis on the restaurant’s sandwich bread on Instagram. Sometimes bodily products are involved. Or animals. Poor hygiene, sex and death can also elicit disgust. Finally there is deviant behaviour that goes beyond societal morals and practices. Disgust is an emotion that started off as a way to avoid harm to the body and has expanded to become a way to avoid harm to the soul. It explains the gut reaction to moral violations, such as when the NRA sent a pro-gun tweet at the time of the Aurora massacre or when Home Depot posted a photo of two African Americans and a man in a monkey suit with the caption, “which drummer is not like the others?”
Disgust provokes both an intense moral and physiological reaction. Watching a video of a young woman eating a live preying mantis may leave a viewer feeling like throwing up. Yet it was also one of the videos that students taking part in a psychology experiment were most likely to forward to others. It may seem odd that people would react by turning to friends and saying, “OMG! You have to see this.” But according to researchers in Belgium and the Netherlands, the more intense an experience, the more we want to share it.
The team found that students talked the most about a clip from the notorious cult film Faces of Death. It was deliberately chosen because it usually prompts a visceral response from viewers. The excerpt showed people at a restaurant smashing a monkey’s skull and eating the brain. The scene looks real enough, but it was faked using Styrofoam hammers and cauliflower for the brains. After watching the clip, students were eager to talk about it with others and compare their feelings. Sharing disgust provides an emotional release. It also is a way of confirming with others the boundaries of what is socially acceptable.
I remember the first time I realized just how much emotions could affect how news travels online. I had been the daily news editor at the BBC News website, deciding on the mix of stories on the front page. It is the most coveted real estate of the site, as millions visit the front page every day. As the daily news editor, my job was to make sure visitors to the site saw the main news of the day, as well as the amusing or entertaining. One day in September a few years back, my colleagues noticed something odd happening on the site.
A story published seven months earlier was suddenly the most read article. It continued to be popular for days, even though it was buried within the site in the Africa section. Adam Curtis, then the World editor at the BBC News website, started investigating why a 185-word story that was months old had unexpectedly become a hit with readers. “It had not been re-published, re-written or revised,” he wrote on the BBC’s editors’ blog. “So how is it that upwards of 100,000 people a day were passing it on to their friends and acquaintances?”
The clue lay in the headline: SUDAN MAN FORCED TO ‘MARRY’ GOAT. The article told the story of a Sudanese man who had been caught having “improper relations with the beast.” He was ordered to pay a marriage dowry of $50 to the goat’s owner. “We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,” the owner of the goat was quoted as saying. The tale of one man and his goat “wife” attracted some attention at the time of publication in February 2006, but soon disappeared into the archive. When it resurfaced in September, Curtis wasn’t sure whether people were really reading the story “some crazed animal lover has been repeatedly hitting the site with fake requests.”
This was no scam. During that morning in September, readers from across the world had stumbled across the story and emailed the link to their friends. The more people read it, the more they told others about it. People in the U.S., Australia, France, India and elsewhere—even in the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg—could not get enough of the story. Other news outlets reported on the travails of Rose the goat.
Rose came to an unfortunate end in May 2007. Eating scraps on the streets of Juba in southern Sudan, she died after choking on a plastic bag. The BBC carried a mock obituary, noting how, during her short marriage, “friends would joke about how she had reached the end of her tether, about whether the couple would have any kids, and if they did, whether they would employ a nanny.”
By the time of her death, Rose had become an Internet phenomenon. Even a year after publication, the original article continued to be among the BBC’s most emailed stories. It became one of the most popular stories published since the site’s launch in 1997. The goat’s tale was one of the first major examples of the impact that sharing can have on the news, taking an obscure story from a remote part of the world and propelling it to international notoriety. The short news item was surprising and unusual, but it also had several of the elements that elicit disgust: animals, sex and moral violations. No wonder it was so widely read.
The story of Rose highlights how, in the marketplace of ideas online, some stories spread due to a gut reaction, not on the basis of whether it is true, useful or entertaining. It was an early sign of the power of emotions to determine the sort of news that was fit to share online. When we email a story from The New York Times, we are not just judging it on whether it is well written or whether we believe everything it says. We react to the amusing, the inspiring, the positive. More surprising is the desire to share stories, photos or videos that arouse negative emotions of anger and disgust.
Emotions have always played a role in how information spreads. Consider the endurance of urban legends that are just too far-fetched to be true. But emotional engagement becomes even more significant in an online world. Social networks make it much easier not only to reach out to a large group of friends, but also to see how they react. When we see others doing something, we tend to ape the same choices. The result is a feedback loop that validates how we feel about a particular story and reinforces our sense of belonging. There are consequences when our social circles become our editorial filters, privileging the sensational over the important and the amusing over the earnest.