Tag Archives: Facebook

When bad ideas go viral

A decade ago viral videos went viral organically. People shared videos, these went into other people’s timelines, and they shared it too. This can still happen on Twitter, to a small extent, but not on Facebook. Facebook viral videos only happen through advertising dollars. Even that cute cat video doesn’t spread unless it is pushed through. The next time you see a viral video with million of views on Facebook, take the time to notice three things:

First, notice that he video was uploaded to Facebook. It’s not a YouTube or Vimeo embedded video, it’s actually a video that was saved on Facebook. This is so that they can fully track, and have advertisers pay for, engagement.

Second, notice that the video will have some branding on it: A website logo or emblem of some kind. It is being promoted by a company or organization.

Third, notice if it is from someone that you regularly see in your timeline. Your timeline used to be every post from every person you follow, now your timeline is curated and you see some people more than others… but when a friend that’s seldom seen in your curated list shares a paid-for/promoted video, suddenly you see their post in your timeline again.

This becomes dangerous when the information shared is false. Here are two specific examples where this is scary right now:

1. Anti-vaccination propaganda: vaccines have made our world a significantly safer place. Hopefully there will be a vaccine for Covid-19 soon, but the reality is that millions of people will likely opt out of taking it and the virus could linger for years, mutating and making the very vaccine useless. Measles have had a resurgence because less people around the world or vaccinating their kids.

2. False claims about Covid-19 cures and anti-mask groups are undermining the science behind fighting this virus. The most recent viral video, taken down by Facebook, has a doctor espousing how she has cured over 300 Covid-19 patients with Hydroxychloroquine. I wrote about this drug as a treatment for covid-19 here: Trying to find the Truth

It’s one thing to say a drug is useful in helping treat an ailment and yet another to claim it is a cure or somehow preventative (like a vaccination).

I’ve had an argument with some very smart people that think Facebook should not take down videos like this because ‘people should be able to watch them and make their own decisions’. Maybe I’d have agreed with them a decade ago, because the video would have to spread organically and people could share their concerns along with the video. But today, that video will get millions of viewers targeted through advertising dollars to promote bad ideas. And advertisers with their own agendas will feed the video to people most likely to agree and share it with support.

This isn’t an organic process. It’s marketplace advertising being used to market and sell bad ideas, entice anger, and polarize opinions and perspectives. Even the taking down of the video has become polarized with the ‘Leftist social media sites only taking down videos they don’t agree with.’ …suddenly this is about politics and not about the spreading of dangerous ideas.

There are a lot of bad ideas being intentionally spread right now. The scary part of this is that these bad ideas are going viral through advertising dollars spent with an agenda to create anger, divisiveness, and the polarization of people.

And while I’ve focused on anti-vaccines and Covid-19 cures, media outlets have used fake (or carefully edited) protest videos to entice anger and gain clicks and advertising revenue, and used language to specifically pander to specific audiences. The desire to share messages virally has made it so that almost any (newsworthy) viral video you see will likely be one that has an agenda, and that agenda is seldom to give you the truth.

Ask yourself who is behind the next viral video you see, then ask yourself what their agenda is?

No more Daily Ink posts on my personal FB page

If you read my Daily Ink post via my Facebook Story, or on my wall, please follow my Pairadimes Facebook page. If you read my blog post somewhere else, just skip to the last paragraph.

As I approach a year of Daily-Ink blog posts, after leaving this blog dormant for a while, I’m reflecting on the process. One thing that I like about when I hit “Publish” on my blog is that it gets auto-posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my Pairadimes Facebook page. Then I manually go to the FB post on my page and add it to my FB story and my FB wall. I’m no longer going to do this. The challenge is that I often write my post either the night before it gets posted or I write it in the morning over an hour before I post it, (I like to have it done before my morning meditation and workout).

So, daily I have this task that I need to remember to do… and it becomes a chore rather than something I want to do. It also makes me feel like I’m ‘plugging my blog’, saying “Look at me!” And while I love comments and engagement on my blog, I do find I write better when I focus on the writing itself and not an audience of readers. Having my Daily-Ink blog automatically go to Twitter, LinkedIn, and my FB page is enough. Please follow my posts at one of these sites if you normally read my blog on my Facebook wall. Today is the last day I regularly share my posts on my FB wall or on my story.

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And as a special request to all readers, I do love your comments! Comments make the blogging experience better. However when I get a comment on Facebook or LinkedIn, or in a a tweet, they are fleeting. They end up on my timelines, never to be seen again. However, I go back to my blog posts often, and a comment there becomes part of a historical conversation that becomes part of the blog. So as a special request, please comment on my blog posts rather than in social spaces. ~ Thank you!

Where do you find my Daily-ink?

I write this daily-ink on a blog at Daily-Ink.DavidTruss.com but I’m pretty sure that’s not were people go to find it. When a new post gets published, it also goes to:

  • My ‘Pairadimes’ Facebook Page
  • LinkedIn, and
  • Twitter

I then share it to my Facebook Story and page.

These social media sites are where my daily posts get seen… but are they read? If you’ve read this far, can you please let me know where you found this post?

2di.me/Daily-Ink-Survey

Thanks!

Down the rabbit hole

The afternoon I went down a very dark rabbit hole. First I read a tweet from an influential twitter profile that grossly miss-communicated some data comparing the flu to COVID-19, making it look like this coronavirus was only a threat to those over the age of 60. This tweet went to her 2.2 million followers. Then I went to another public figure’s tweet that was very controversial and did something I almost never do, I went to the tweet and read the conversation/reply thread that followed. Wow. I remember now why I don’t usually do this.

It was dark. It showed the bipolar divide that I spoke about in my post, Ideas on a Spectrum. It was nasty, it was mean, it was ignorant, it was a complete waste of my time. It achieved nothing. Not for me, not for anyone that commented. The lines were drawn and both sides could only preach to their side.

I’m glad that this isn’t my typical experience on Twitter. I’m sorry for those that spend a lot of time in this sad, angry space on both Twitter and Facebook. I’ll happily go back to my world of educators geeking out, sharing, and learning on Twitter… and I’ll stay there for a while. A word of advice as we spend more time at home, more connected than usual to news and our social streams: Keep away from the rabbit holes and check your sources for news and for click-bait headlines.

A while back I wrote about a new tragedy of the commons. In this post I said,

Indeed we have a new, social-emotional, tragedy of the commons. Despite our understanding that perpetuating the onslaught of negative news is, ‘contrary to [our] long-term best interests’, we still do it. And social media isn’t making things any better. We used to be able to blame the media monopolies and moguls, but now we are the news-makers: We publish freely, and quickly and without thought as to how we are part of the problem.

We don’t need to feed this negative loop, and we don’t need to feed on it either.

World Markets and Apps

Two apps have made me realize how the world is changing. These apps are very popular, but not here in North America. Here, a very popular app for connecting with others for business (as well as socially) is Slack – a messaging app for teams.

However, pop over to India and WhatsApp is the cool tool that everyone is using. “Simple. Personal. Real Time Messaging.”

And hop over to China (as I did just recently) and WeChat is the tool that is already ‘Connecting a half billion people’… A HALF A BILLION PEOPLE!

Slack-whatsapp-wechat

One of my students, Brandon Mayhew, was invited to the Facebook F8 Developer’s conference, and he wrote about Mark Zukerberg’s opening presentation and an ongoing theme he heard, “4.1 Billion was repeated several times at the event and that’s the number of people that aren’t connected to the internet, over the next few years facebook plans on investing heavily on infrastructure to help connect these people in these remote regions of the globe.”

As an interesting aside, Facebook bought WhatsApp… for 19 Billion Dollars!

When over 1/3 of the world’s population lives in just two countries, and when those countries are on a fast track to get everyone connected… it is easy to see that if you were building an app, you’d want it to be used in other countries beyond North America, and specifically in China and India.

Soon, you are going to see some of the top apps start in other countries and the American/Canadian market will be an afterthought. In fact it has already happened… WeChat was ‘Made in China’!