Illinois News Bureau: Viral videos about private moments may affect offline relationships. “When individuals share videos about surprise reunions with their intimate partners on the internet, the reaction from viewers may not be the roses and unicorns the posters expected. Viewers’ responses to shared videos have the potential to shape offline relationships, a case study of one such video found.”
Times of Israel: Americans caught trying to smuggle hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel. “At least two American couples have been caught by Israeli customs for attempting to smuggle a total of more than 650 pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel, as the country experiences a dire shortage of the snack due to a TikTok craze.”
New York Times: The Satisfaction of Viral Quitting. “TikTok is full of advice about what to do after quitting a job. Ms. Garcia is part of a different trend, one that predates TikTok, in which young people are posting mini dramas that draw millions of viewers. And in some cases, these very public videos can translate into new career opportunities, helping those who post them build their online personalities.”
Agence France-Presse: Activism Goes Viral: How scientists are using TikTok to campaign for climate change. “A growing number of scientists are using the short-form video app TikTok to increase climate change literacy, campaign for action, and combat online misinformation. Some of them have gone viral.”
Search Engine Land: Google launches new Google Trends portal. “Google has launched a new look and feel for the Google Trends portal. This update brings a new look, with real-time trends on the home page, updated hourly with links directly to publishers’ news articles, the company announced.”
Daily Beast: How This Rookie Congressman Got TikTok Famous. “Since that first viral post, [Congressman Jeff] Jackson has attracted nearly 500,000 followers on TikTok, and his plainspoken, no-frills videos careen through the app’s algorithm before plopping into the feeds of somewhere between 1 and 3 million people on any given day.”
University of British Columbia: ‘Greed is good’ for likes and retweets if you’re a U.S. senator. “The researchers from UBC’s department of psychology analyzed every tweet posted by U.S. senators from early 2013 to late 2021—a total of 861,104 tweets from 140 senators. The researchers were looking specifically for communication about greed, so they could see if it correlates with more likes and retweets. As it turns out, it does.”
Garbage Day: I Gave Into The New Twitter Algorithm And I Went Way Too Viral. “I would put out links to Garbage Day, they would get like 5-10 retweets (if that), and I had sort of accepted that my time using the site regularly was over. But as I was lurking on the app, my very sick and compulsive content-making brain started to turn on and I began to slowly get how the site worked now. So I finally decided to put my theory to the test and it worked both times.” Laughing a little at him getting “only” 5-10 retweets.
Ars Technica: Viral Instagram photographer has a confession: His photos are AI-generated. “With over 26,000 followers, Jos Avery’s Instagram account has a trick up its sleeve. While it may appear to showcase stunning photo portraits of people, they are not actually people at all. Avery has been posting AI-generated portraits for the past few months, and as more fans praise his apparently masterful photography skills, he has grown nervous about telling the truth.”
Search Engine Land: TikTok has a secret “Heating” (cheating?) button. “Six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, as well as internal documents and communications reviewed by Forbes, TikTok and ByteDance staff use a practice called ‘heating’ to artificially boost the distribution of certain videos in addition to relying on the algorithm to determine what becomes popular.”
MakeUseOf: 8 Ways to Discover the Most Popular Online Content. “These days, most people get their daily dose of news from Facebook posts, Twitter, Reddit threads, and more. However, if you don’t want to rely on social media as your only source for news, there are other ways to discover more popular content online. There was a time when news aggregators and RSS Feeds were more common. These tools still have a place in the digital world despite the rise of social media. Here, we’ll be looking at a few of the best options.”
IFLScience: Social Media Trends Are Encouraging Animal Abuse In Viral Videos, Review Finds. “Social media is encouraging cases of animal cruelty, with trends driven by viral videos motivating some content creators to bring wild animals into their channels. That’s the message from the Social Media Animal Cruelty Coalition (SMACC) following research conducted as part of a coalition with 13 animal protection organizations.”
Florida Tech: University Study Examines Viral Probability of Social Media Posts. “[Xi] Zhang’s work provides a straightforward way of computing the average number of future reshares based on how the content has fared so far in terms of popularity. More plainly, Zhang’s work allows to predict how the resharing of online content will evolve over time.”
NBC News: False claim about Iran protester executions goes viral with help from celebrities and politicians . “An image that has circulated widely on social media falsely states that 15,000 protesters have been sentenced to death. That claim is not true, but has been amplified by major public figures including the actresses Viola Davis and Sophie Turner and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Representatives for Davis did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Turner declined to comment.”
NBC News: Their children went viral. Now they wish they could wipe them from the internet.. “For decades, celebrities have obscured their children’s faces on social media and from paparazzi pictures. Now, a growing collective of creators like Kodye Eylse are pushing other parents to take similar precautions when making content about kids.”
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