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Recent studies have documented the type of content that is most likely to spread widely, or go "viral," on social media, yet little is known about people's perceptions of what goes viral or what should go viral. This is critical to understand because there is widespread debate about how to improve or regulate social media algorithms. We recruited a sample of participants that is nationally representative of the U.S. population (according to age, gender, and race/ethnicity) and surveyed them about their perceptions of social media virality (n = 511). In line with prior research, people believe that divisive content, moral outrage, negative content, high-arousal content, and misinformation are all likely to go viral online. However, they reported that this type of content should not go viral on social media. Instead, people reported that many forms of positive content—such as accurate content, nuanced content, and educational content—are not likely to go viral even though they think this content should go viral. These perceptions were shared among most participants and were only weakly related to political orientation, social media usage, and demographic variables. In sum, there is broad consensus around the type of content people think social media platforms should and should not amplify, which can help inform solutions for improving social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines what types of messages users posted and spread about #Black/Blue/AllLivesMatter during the Black History Month of 2022. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, about one million tweets were analyzed to test if different levels of opinion leaders tend to spread different kinds of messages related to the context. Using the curation logic of Thorson and Well and Lakoff's semantic theory as theoretical lenses, we offer some observations about the differences in logics (incentives and norms) that opinion leaders in our dataset might face. We find that different levels of opinion leaders shared different types of messages. The implications of this study call for strategies that foster meaningful discussions on social movements amid polarized views. The study also advocates for refining platform design to encourage the dissemination of factual information over contentious arguments and reaching a societal consensus on critical social issues, such as racial inequality and police brutality. This research contributes to updating the theory of curation logics, virality, and opinion leaders, as well as provides empirical data for the discussions of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and its related discussions of #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention is a valuable and scarce resource in the online "attention economy." But not all attention is equally valuable. This article advances a relational theory of the value of attention by situating social media content production as a field. I draw from an ethnography of a "content farm" and interviews with 60 creators who make highly-paid but low-status entertainment videos designed to go viral on Facebook, as well as on SnapChat, TikTok, and YouTube. I propose an inverse relationship between status and reach: higher reach may pose risks to a creator's status and reputation. Furthermore, in pursuit of the highest possible reach, viral creators construct situational authenticity, rather than personal authenticity, and they relate to their audiences antagonistically, in contrast to existing studies of influencers. How creators seek attention, from whom, and with what conversion strategies, I argue, depends upon their location in a cultural field because online audiences exist in a hierarchy of perceived social worth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks new conceptualizations of viruses both as a scientific object of study and a cultural object of fear and fascination. After World War II, the scientific study of viruses took on greater significance. The discovery of viral DNA and RNA revolutionized the understanding of microbial and human evolution. Technological innovations (electron microscopy, x-ray crystallography) and improvements in vaccine development gave scientists greater confidence in managing diseases such as polio and influenza. But in the 1980s, the emergence of HIV-AIDS, a deadly new virus that provoked intense stigma and discrimination, undercut that confidence. Scientific understandings of HIV led to more evolutionary, ecological views of disease origins; widely disseminated through the news and entertainment industries, those views inspired a newer, darker era of viral imaginaries. The identity of viruses as objects of scientific study, national security planning and popular culture have become difficult to disentangle as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media posts made by ordinary people are in most cases only viewed by a small number of friends and contacts. But some posts get thousands of likes, comments, and shares, a phenomenon often dubbed as going viral. This paper provides a content analysis of viral Facebook posts published by common people in Norway, and of the news coverage they received. The social media posts that go viral in Norway deal with a variety of topics, like health care, elderly care, bullying, traffic safety, unemployment, animal welfare, school, and education. Some of the viral posts were open job applications, and some were creative expressions. Many of the posts address political issues, and becomes part of the public debate. The posts are personal in their mode of address, often with an emotional appeal for civic engagement. They resemble the letters to the editor, though they bypass the editor and go directly to online self-publication, and in this way, moving parts of the public debate from the newspapers to social media. Most of the viral posts got news coverage, which in most cases focused more on the popularity cues and the virality of the post, and less on the topic the post addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of TikTok has reached the news media, which has adapted to the logic of the platform, in a context marked by the incidental consumption of news, virality and the intermediation of technology in access to information. The popularity of this social network invites news outlets to address a young audience on a platform characterized by visual and short content and dynamics defined by algorithmic recommendations, trending hashtags and challenges. Based on an exploratory search of news media and programmes on TikTok from around the world, we selected 234 accounts and conducted a content analysis of the 19 news media and programmes identified with a verified profile and general thematic scope. The results point to a progressive incorporation of the media since 2019, with the purpose of informing, positioning their brand and adapting to the logic of TikTok in a new approach to journalism for younger generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out three ways of conceiving publics: (1) an organic conception, the public as the body politic; (2) an individualized conception, the public as an aggregate of individuals, grouped by social categories; and (3) a relational conception, in which publics are defined as open-ended networks of actors linked through flows of communication, shared stories, and civic or other collective concerns. These conceptions have emerged not only through theoretical reflection but also as the result of historical and institutional developments. Building on work from Tarde and Habermas down to recent theorists, I seek to advance the relational conception, suggest its implications for research, and highlight its connection to contemporary developments in both theory and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on the success of politicians' messages on social media has so far focused on a limited number of platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, and predominately studied the effects of textual content. This research reported here applies computer vision analysis to a total of 59,020 image posts published by 172 Instagram accounts of U.S. politicians, both candidates and office holders, and examines how visual attributes influence audience engagement such as likes and comments. In particular, this study introduces an unsupervised approach that combines transfer learning and clustering techniques to discover hidden categories from large-scale visual data. The results reveal that different self-personalization strategies in visual media, for example, images featuring politicians in private, nonpolitical settings, showing faces, and displaying emotions, generally increase audience engagement. Yet, a significant portion of politician's Instagram posts still fell into the traditional, "politics-as-usual" type of political communication, showing professional settings and activities. The analysis explains how self-personalization is embodied in specific visual portrayals and how different self-presentation strategies affect audience engagement on a popular but less studied social media platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Celebrities playing fictionalized versions of themselves in commercials, campaigns, and video spots have become an increasingly viral phenomenon. The George Clooney commercials for Nespresso are circulated and promoted on various media platforms, segments from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon are released on NBC.com and shared on YouTube, and some videos are explicitly created to go viral and even published on social media sites. In this article, I draw on recent work in fictionality studies and studies of virality to investigate how the celebrity trend of 'vitafiction' possesses a viral potential. In vitafictional performances, the relationship between fiction and reality is thematized through a concurrent surplus of fictionality and biographical details, which invites recipients to negotiate between the celebrity's performance and the receiver's media cultural knowledge. Taking vitafictional performances in two online circulated spots as case studies – 'Bono rides a bike with Jimmy Fallon', a spot for The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, and Peter Jackson's Facebook video post 'Home Invasion', a video that thematizes Jackson's role as director of an episode of Doctor Who – this article demonstrates how the equivocality that is central to the vitafictional performance comprises a force that prompts receivers to circulate the vitafictional message. It is argued that the mediatization of society and the virality that this brings about create new possibilities for the impact of this kind of celebrity self-fashioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a socio-visual constructivist approach to explain how the Kony 2012 video became a site of intense symbolic struggle regarding how to represent humanity in the digital age and, in the process, one of the most viral and intensely contested cultural artifacts of the last few years. The first section demonstrates that the video employs the visual conventions of personification and rescue, which form part of an iconographic repertoire coding certain events as humanitarian crises recognizable as such by Euro-American audiences. Conversely, the author examines how these tropes drew upon a neocolonial framing of humanitarianism, one that Ugandan and Western critics questioned and against which they offered an alternative vision of the post-civil war realities of northern Uganda. However, to avoid pictorial reification, the article's second section retraces the institutional and actor-based networks through which still and moving images from Kony 2012 and its associated campaign circulated. The concept of pictorial exponentiality is introduced to explain how these images multiplied in digital public spaces through the accelerating digital cycles. This section also examines the concept of digital feedback loops to make sense of the non-linear and institutionally 'flattened' social relations binding pictorial actors debating the video's representational content and responding to each other via social media- and web-based exchanges. Kony 2012 was a key marker of an era during which the visual politics and ethics of portrayal of the human unfold digitally, through social media and online video platforms as much as conventional institutions of image production and dissemination. By treating the video as a cultural artifact whose viral rise and fall are attributable to the pictorial conventions upon which it drew and the structure of the networks through which it circulated, the article reveals how understandings of humanity are visually constituted, contested, and undone in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has identified a strong consumer demand for sensationalized and conflict-oriented news coverage. With the rise of social network services as central spaces for encountering news, there is a need to move beyond the notion of consumer demand (measured by attention to news stories) to a broader conception of user engagement (encompassing attention as well as social interactions online). This article seeks to remedy this by analyzing which parts of election coverage tend to become popular and go viral. It develops a concept of user agendas that include popularity (news stories that receive most clicks on news Web sites) and virality (stories that users share most intensively on social network sites). The article then applies the concepts in a case study of online news coverage during the 2015 Danish parliamentary election. Through an analysis of frames, sentiments, and actors, it is shown that game-strategic and personalized coverage tend to attract large-scale attention on news Web sites, whereas issue-oriented coverage fares better on social network sites. This suggests that what users demand depend on where they encounter news. Users tend to engage with one kind of news in private settings and another in the public settings on the social Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how candidates’ Facebook performance, measured by the number of average shares, likes, and comments per post, affects the personal vote they gained during the Hungarian general election campaign of 2014. The database contains three of the most voted-for candidates owning Facebook pages from all single-member districts. The results show that the average number of shares on candidates’ Facebook pages is positively associated with electoral outcome after controlling for, inter alia, the vote share of their respective party on list in the districts, whereas the numbers of likes and comments are not significantly related to the dependent variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents the viral culture of videos, memes, and websites deploying the tropes of parody and satire as a newly emerging discourse of social and cultural critique on the Indian web. It situates this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of a prior tradition of heterodoxy in India as well as the globally proliferating memetic culture. The essay argues that the speech is distinguished by a logic of repetition with difference both in its parodic/satiric text as well as through its medium that allows the text to repeat at new sites creating new meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]