• What 1,500 videos tell us

• Why calm loses in an attention economy

• Cure claim on Tuesday, sales pitch on Wednesday

• What the data tells us we should do differently

In the 18 days between April 24th and May 12th, an analysis of over 1,500 hantavirus videos identified across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube found they were watched 1.16 billion times. TikTok alone accounted for 95% of those views. The attention spike was enormous and brief: 128 million views on May 4th, the day the first deaths were reported, then a steep decline — down to 4.8 million views by May 12th. Most of the audience had moved on before the quarantine in Nebraska even started.

Independent creators, not news organizations, generated 52% of the outlier views, over 258 million. Doctors generated 2%. Videos tagged with fear and anxiety themes pulled in 69 million views. Videos explicitly comparing hantavirus to COVID, 88 of them, drew 27 million. The content that performed best was emotional, not informational.

TikTok doesn’t distribute content based on who you follow. It distributes based on what keeps you watching. A 653-follower account posted a hantavirus video and got 487,000 views. A 14,200-follower account got 3.2 million. The algorithm doesn’t know or care whether the person talking is an infectious disease specialist or someone who made their first video that morning. It rewards content that triggers emotion. Calm, accurate content does not get the same distribution.

Dr. Rubin, an allergist with 2.2...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiiAFBVV95cUxQOHdUMWk0c1FJeW1iSy1oaU9X...