“A story about an overworked Oxford student’s suicide currently tops the most shared and most viewed lists on the Independent’s website despite dating from 1997. ‘Sean, 12, is the youngest father’ (January 1998), and ‘Scotland’s ugliest woman honoured’ (May 1999) are another two that highlight the trend. (…) It’s most likely that the old stories were discovered by chance or a Google search and then spread friend-by-friend on Facebook. The impact of Facebook’s so-called frictionless sharing on user privacy has been widely discussed, but these early signs show that ‘frictionless sharing’ - introduced in September this year - could be having an impact on the news too. Certainly on which bits of it people read, anyway.”—
“Breaking News: Man Lands on Moon!” (via Evgeny Morozov)
This is an amplification of an existing effect, I think: it seems like every time the news slows a bit, Man Marries Goat reappears on the BBC’s most-viewed lists, with no frictionless sharing needed.
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I’d also add that these things are spread by sites like reddit and 4chan. The former innocently on the whole ‘OMG some d00d married a goat wtf’, the latter more nefariously ‘let’s get that story about Indian condoms in most read again for the lols’ (see also F365 forum).
(Source: marathonpacks)
