Why you deserve viral crap all over your Facebook feed, from the people who make it
5x5 A year ago I stumbled upon the closest 5x5 has ever come to a breakout story when I took aim at a piece of feelgood viral trash in How to spot a fake news story, even when it’s not political, and why you should care.
If that link is TL;DR, the subject is an unsourced feelgood story on the viral content site Newsner, about a Portuguese school where the staff had put up a poster telling parents to take responsibility for raising their children with good manners. It had become a viral meme amongst friends who are prone to that kind of infection, and like any virus, it was trying to reproduce.
I broke it down as a textbook example of the rubbish clogging up our infosphere: and it’s won more than 7,000 views, more than 4,000 people have read it, and it picks up new views every week.
Several months later, the meme factory responded in a Facebook message from Norhan Engström, managing editor of nyheter365/Newsner.com. Her LinkedIn CV lists an admirable history in international journalism, but like so many modern journalists I guess she’s found that it doesn’t pay and proudly boasts of her conversion to marketing and memes:
My areas of expertise include, most recently, digital native advertizing [sic], social media optimization, and producing viral branded content. Have run several exceptional and highly successful campaigns for a variety of clients, from online gaming to fashion retail…I have personally produced some of the top viral stories in Sweden in 2016/2017.
Yes, it turns out that those greener-than-thou Scandinavians are churning out information pollution. But enough of the ad hominem, and I don’t want to single out Newsner or Sweden unfairly, when it’s just competing to plant memes in the same fertile and undiscriminating brains as Mail Online or LADbible.
Norhan wasn’t very happy that I had described her story as ‘fake news’, so I asked what she thought it was. These are her main points:
1 Readers don’t want any difficult facts: “‘The sign’ that we created was a translation from Portugese, to Swedish, to English, to simply adapt it for our audience…We adapt our writing to our audience. They are not interested in details, such as name of school etc. We are a feel-good news site, we publish inspiring stories. Not to be mistaken with ‘fake news’.”
2 Readers don’t care if the story can be verified: “We understand — and our audience does appreciate — that they may refer to more mainstream news sites for full details on any story. We left the source link out at the time as it was from Swedish press and thus in Swedish, and thus not relevant to our readers. If you doubt the story, a quick google search could help anyone see that.” In reality, my thorough Google search didn’t find the source, because it was in either Swedish or Portuguese.
3 We’re not journalists, so don’t expect the same standards: “Nowhere do we claim to be a part of mainstream journalism, a source of news for any particular audience. But this still does not equate us to ‘fake news’. Fact is that there’s an appreciation for the kind of stories that we do tell on our site, and how we tell them.”
4 It’s not our fault: “”Sentimental crap” exists in the real world, too. 🙂” Ah, the smiley emoji, universal shorthand for “My argument has no weight so please don’t take it seriously”.
5 Swedish people deserve a link: “We left the source link out at the time as it was from Swedish press and thus in Swedish, and thus not relevant to our readers.” So Swedish readers got a link to a Swedish news report on events in Portugal, but English-language readers don’t. To its credit, Newsner has now added a link to the Swedish source.
So if you’ve found yourself reading a sharing a viral meme, don’t blame Newsner (or any other meme factory) for targeting the weak spots of human information processing evolved for life in small communities on an African savannah. It’s your fault for being a weak, indiscriminate cesspool of viral unformation.
Fortunately Facebook may be immunizing your feed with its latest changes, and 2018 could be a bad year for the merchants or viral memes. But viruses are notoriously hard to wipe out.
