Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (14 page)

GIVE THEM WHAT SPREADS, NOT WHAT’S GOOD

THE ADVICE THAT MIT MEDIA STUDIES PROFESSOR Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” With social sharing comes traffic, and with traffic comes money. Something that isn’t shared isn’t worth anything.

For someone tasked with advancing narratives in the media, the flip side of this advice is equally straightforward: If it spreads, you’re golden. Blogs don’t have the resources to advertise their posts, and bloggers certainly don’t have the time to work out a publicity launch for something they’ve written. Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own and get attention, links, and new readers with the least work possible. Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn’t even register on their list of priorities.

If the quality of their content doesn’t matter to bloggers, do you think it’s going to matter to marketers? It’s never mattered to me. So I design what I sell to bloggers based on what I know (and they think) will spread. I give them what they think will go viral online—and make them money.

A TALE OF TWO CITY SLIDE SHOWS

If you’re like me, you’ve sat and stared in fascination at the pictures of the ruins of Detroit that get passed around the Internet. We’ve all gaped at the stunning shots of the cavelike interior of the decaying United Artists Theater and the towering Michigan Central Station that resembles an abandoned Gothic cathedral. These beautiful high-res photo slideshows are impressive pieces of online photojournalism…or so you think.

Like everyone else, I ate up these slideshows, and I even harbored a guilty desire to go to Detroit and walk through the ruins. My friends know this and send me the newest ones as soon as they come out. When I see the photos I can’t help thinking of this line from
Fight Club
:

In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.
…
You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower.
And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

To see a broken, abandoned American city is a moving, nearly spiritual experience, one you are immediately provoked to share with everyone you know.

A slideshow that generates a reaction like that is online gold. An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos. A recent twenty-picture display posted by the
Huffington Post
was commented on more than four thousand times and liked twenty-five thousand times on Facebook. And that was the second time they’d posted it. The
New York Times
’s website has two of their own, for a total of twenty-three photos.
The Guardian
’s website has a sixteen-pager.
Time.com
’s eleven-pager is the top Google result for “Detroit photos.” We’re talking about millions of views combined.

One would think that any photo of Detroit would be an instant hit online. Not so. A series of beautiful but sad photographs of foreclosed and crumbling Detroit houses and their haggard residents was posted on Magnum Photos’s site in 2009, well before most of the others. It shows the same architectural devastation, the same poverty and decline. While the slideshow on the
Huffington Post
received four thousand comments within days, these photos got twenty-one comments over
two years
.
¹

ONE SPREADS, THE OTHER DOESN’T

In an article in the
New Republic
called “The Case Against Economic Disaster Porn,” Noreen Malone points out that one thing stands out about the incredibly viral photographs of Detroit: Not a single one of the popular photos of the ruins of Detroit has a person in it. That was the difference between the
Huffington Post
slideshows and the Magnum photos—Magnum dared to include human beings in their photos of Detroit. The photos that spread, on the other hand, are deliberately devoid of any sign of life.
²

Detroit has a homeless population of nearly twenty thousand, and in 2011, city funding for homeless shelters was cut in half. Thousands more live in foreclosed houses and buildings without electricity or heat, the very same structures in the pictures. These photos don’t just omit people. Detroit is a city overrun by stray dogs, which roam the city in packs hunting and scavenging for food. Conservative figures estimate that there are as many as 50,000 wild dogs living in Detroit and something like 650,000 feral cats. In other words, you can’t walk a block in Detroit without seeing heartbreaking and deeply wounded signs of life.

You’d have to try not to. And that’s exactly what these slideshow photographers do. Why? Because all that is depressing. As Jonah Peretti, the virality expert behind both the
Huffington
Post
and
BuzzFeed,
believes, “if something is a total bummer, people don’t share it.” And since people wouldn’t share it, blogs won’t publish it. Seeing the homeless and drug addicts and starving, dying animals would take away all the fun.
*
It’d make the viewers feel uncomfortable, and unsettling images are not conducive to sharing. Why, Peretti asks, would anyone—bloggers or readers—want to pass along bad feelings?
³

The economics of the web make it impossible to portray the complex situation in Detroit accurately. It turns out that photos of Detroit that spread do so precisely
because they are dead
. Simple narratives like the haunting ruins of a city spread and live, while complicated ones like a city filled with real people who desperately need help don’t.

One city. Two possible portrayals. One is a bummer, one looks cool. Only one makes it into the
Huffington Post
slideshow. Only one is worth trying to sell the bloggers.

THE DNA OF THE VIRUS

Only a certain style of video, article, or tweet has the ability to rise above the overwhelming noise and make an impression. But the web is not some fair or positive meritocracy, and the first comprehensive study on why this is bears this out. In 2010, two researchers at the Wharton School looked at seven thousand articles that made it onto the
New York Times
Most E-mailed List. (A story from the
Times
is shared on Twitter once every four seconds, making the list one of the biggest media platforms on the web.) The researchers’ results confirm almost everything we see when content like the sensational ruin porn of Detroit goes viral. For me it confirmed every intuition behind my manipulations.
⁴

According to the story, “the most powerful predictor of virality is
how much anger an article evokes
” [emphasis mine]. I will say it again:
The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.
No wonder the outrage I created for Tucker’s movie worked so well. Anger has such a profound effect that one standard deviation increase in the anger rating of an article is the equivalent of spending an additional three hours as the lead story on the front page of
NYTimes.com
.

Again, extremes in any direction have a large impact on how something will spread, but certain emotions do better than others. For instance, an equal shift in the positivity of an article is the equivalent of spending about 1.2 hours as the lead story. It’s a significant but clear difference. The angrier an article makes the reader, the better.

The researchers found that while sadness is an extreme emotion, it is a wholly unviral one. Sadness, like what one might feel to see a stray dog shivering for warmth or a homeless man begging for money, is typically a low-arousal emotion. Sadness depresses our impulse for social sharing. It’s why nobody wanted to share the Magnum photos but gladly shared the ones on the
Huffington Post
. The HuffPo photos were
awe-
some; they made us angry, or they surprised us. Such emotions trigger a desire to act—they are arousing—and that is exactly the reaction a publisher hopes to exploit.

In turn, it’s what marketers exploit as well. A powerful predictor of whether content will spread online is valence, or the degree of positive or negative emotion a person is made to feel. Both extremes are more desirable than anything in the middle. Regardless of the topic, the more an article makes someone feel good
or
bad, the more likely it is to make the Most E-mailed list. No marketer is ever going to push something with the stink of reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.