Where Does Social Media TRENDS Come From?
Understanding what is happening on the platforms has become more difficult than ever
The mechanism of social media in selecting and displaying the most popular content has become more complicated and ambiguous. It is not unlikely that a certain video will make noise in a corner of social networks, but it will not appear on your pages and you will not know about it. Or notice that the most popular videos on social media are things you’ve never seen before. Therefore, “trending” and “going viral” have lost their meaning and importance and no longer mean popular. So how do news and videos become trending? What are the dangers of this dizzying complexity of social networks? And is it possible that there are big political interests involved?
Today, you can access the most extensive network the Internet has ever seen. By clicking and scrolling through web pages, you are one of the five billion people who contribute to the production of an endless pool of networked information — trillions of bytes of information generated daily.
The vastness of the Internet is dizzying. Some of my colleagues in the media have written about how “impenetrable” and impermanent the Internet has become, to the point that the Internet is “evaporating.” Perhaps this is because social media is coming to an end, and there is no clear replacement. Or maybe, artificial intelligence will gradually take over the internet with a wealth of combined information derived from algorithms and destroy the old web. Behind all these theories there is a general idea: it has become more difficult than ever to understand what is happening in the online world.
The Internet long ago destroyed the idea of monoculture, but today new issues have cast a shadow on the ecosystem of social networks, such as the ambiguous “Four You” suggested content system in the social network TikTok, the increasing trend of paywalls that restrict your access to some websites — such as The Medium, the dissolution of Twitter and the emergence of Elon Musk-owned X, and the disparity and poor correlation between news stories on social media websites. The broad effect of this is that each person receives a unique social networking experience, depending on their mindset and browsing habits.
The idea of popularity in social networks is still a matter of debate: did this trend go viral? Did everyone see this post, or is this just my lonely corner on social media? It seems that more than ever, we are looking at social media in a crooked mirror and trying to interpret its distorted image.
I’ll quote Ryan Broderick, who writes for the Garbage Day newsletter, “We don’t really know what’s going on with the platforms.”
In the past six months, while cooperating with NewsWipe and other online news analysis companies and preparing independent information reports, Broderick has been aiming to monitor the most popular content and faces from sites such as Facebook, X, Reddit, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube. In his opinion, in the 2010s, curious people could better understand the state of social networks:
“The topics that went viral and spread on Facebook had a different color and smell than the popular topics on YouTube or Twitter, but you could take a look at their totality, put them together. He hit it put it together and said this is the Internet.”
It was around mid-2021 and early 2022 that Broderick noticed that the way information was being disseminated had changed. Some news made noise in a corner of social networks and then disappeared, without appearing on his virtual page and being aware of them. But fake “viral” trends appeared with high frequency, although there was little evidence of high human involvement.
Consider for a moment TikTok, which is almost the most active social networking platform. What do you think are the most popular posts this year? You might imagine that reports from the Middle East or articles about the bombing of Gaza were among the most visited, or maybe less violent content like the generational dance trend or gossip about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I have to tell you that none of these.
According to TikTok’s year-end report, the most popular videos in the United States, with nearly half a billion views each, are not topical but include things like hairdressing tutorials, the soothing sounds of eating (ASMR), a woman showing off her big cat, or the guy who spray painted the ceiling of his house to look like the comic book character Iron Man.
As one of the Verge headlines this month said,
“TikTok’s most watched videos are the ones you’ve probably never seen before.”
This is also true for other platforms. Facebook’s latest Most Viewed Content report is full of soulless, mindless, copycat memes and videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times.
This pattern is not unique to social media. It was just last week that Netflix, very unexpectedly, published an unusual and comprehensive “interaction report” in which the statistics and audience consumption patterns of more than 18,000 movies and TV shows in the network’s archive were included. Netflix’s move to clarify led to confusion among its viewers: the most popular show from January to June 2023 was the thriller “The Night Agent,” which was watched 812 million hours worldwide. Someone posted on the Threads social network
“I am always aware of the media, especially television programs, and I follow them, but until now I had never heard of the name of the most watched television program in the world.”
This confusion is characteristic of discrete social networks, which gives the impression that two opposite phenomena are happening at the same time: popular and trending content is produced and consumed on an incredible scale, however, it is not popular among all people. We are living in a period of history where we are blessed to be more easily ignorant of other people’s circumstances and their tastes and interests. It is also easier than ever before to consider information or trends that seem popular and popular, while their popularity is limited to certain individuals and groups.
Last month, TikTok was filled with films and videos of users reading and praising Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” on social networks. The trend of this issue caused the media members to give a serious warning about the spread of anti-Semitism immediately. But with an initial analysis of the content on this platform, more subtle points could be found. Although there were indeed such videos on the platform, the Washington Post found that the hashtag #Letter to the American People was used only 274 times during two days. The videos were viewed 1.8 million times, although according to the Washington Post, this figure was far less than the views of hashtags such as travel, skincare, and anime in another 24 hours.
The consequences of this incident were chaotic and confusing, and I worry that the same thing will happen to the 2024 election and cast a shadow on it.
Journalists familiar with social networks tried to show that the letter did not go viral, but other journalists rightly pointed out that although according to TikTok’s standards, maybe this letter has not gone viral, but the videos related to this letter are still disturbing and problematic, for example, one of the videos has been liked more than 10,000 times. Politicians also resorted to the same news to advance their previous and long-standing complaints and clearly express their concern over the fact that, according to them, TikTok, controlled by the Chinese government, is inciting the young generation of America. TikTok did not respond to my request for comment.
While those involved debated whether the trend was real or not, this level of coverage brought more attention to the videos and made them go viral on other platforms, such that one TikTok video on the X platform received 41 million views. If this cycle repeats itself next year, the 2024 presidential election will be very challenging, because it will be the “invisible TikTok election”, when viralization becomes meaningless and unimportant, but it will still be an excuse to justify conflicts.
I called Brandon Silverman after the “Letter to the American People” controversy. He is the founder of Crowdtangle, a tool that tracks the most popular posts on Facebook, which was acquired by Facebook in 2016. Silverman left Facebook in 2021. Now, he believes that tracking and monitoring the origin and verification of trends is a very difficult issue in new platforms that have a high level of technology. Unlike Twitter before Elon Musk, X’s mechanism is difficult to understand, he says, and TikTok only allows university researchers, subject to formal request, access to its research interface.
“We’re talking about data and information that we don’t have, and on the Internet, we’re just talking about ourselves,” says Silverman.
Crowdtangle itself did not allow any new users to join last year, and this itself was a turning point in all these discussions: researchers and fact-finding groups believed that Meta had neutralized the Crowdtangle team as part of redefining its internal structure. Reporters speculated that the tool has become a problem for Meta executives since it revealed how popular content such as conspiracy theories, election boycotts, and far-right figures are on the social network. A Meta spokesperson told me in a statement that Crowdtangle’s paid accounts are still active, and that last month the company rolled out a new set of tools and features to give users of both Facebook and Instagram professional accounts “quick and real-time access to public content of posts, have pages, groups and events”.
Popularity and virality aren’t the only measures of being important, but without a proper understanding of what’s going on in social media, we’ll likely let others take advantage of us, or waste our precious time thinking, forgetting, or arguing on issues that are not important or have little impact on the world around us. Likewise, politicians can take trends out of context to fit their political agendas.
Last month, Senator Marsha Blackburn raised the “alarming popularity” of bin Laden’s Letter to the American People on TikTok on the Senate floor. Blackburn claimed that “this popularity did not happen by itself, TikTok is behind this amount of popularity and is driving it”. Some high-ranking Democrats, including New York Governor Kathy Hukol, also called out TikTok. When we waste our time chasing shadows, Silverman argues,
“We miss the more important issues that deserve our attention and time, and that tell us important truths about platforms, ourselves, and the world.”
Of course, I don’t mean that everything would be fine if social media were more centralized. “What I’ve experienced at Crowdtangle is that, for the most part, it’s just a few special, influential accounts that make something go viral,” Silverman said. He acknowledged that because then the platform’s audience would be more homogenous and less fragmented, with a few big account owners dictating what goes viral much more than an army of smaller accounts. Broderick, while agreeing with this issue, pointed out that especially in the case of networks such as Twitter, media organizations could create or strengthen a certain trend, and because of this, they could increase their range and dominance, as a result, they could fulfill their predictions by managing the streams.
“One of the reasons there’s so much concern about this is because you can’t rig the race if you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Silverman said.
The transition from social networks as we know them may feel like a return to something on a smaller scale but purer. Social networks free from specific monocultures can be a kind of liberation, especially for those who are constantly looking for trends virals, and current affairs. But this new era in social networks stabilizes the big tech giants and all the emerging platforms of the future, which, as the only existing defenders, seek to monitor and monitor information and how it circulates in social networks.
We have prior knowledge of them and know that they are not reliable narrators and reliable stewards, but, in a fragmented social network and a network where recommendation algorithms have overtaken traditional methods of following, we have no choice but to choose our meter and criteria according to this Companies act and rely on them. It may seem like an exaggeration, but we have to accept that without having an inner understanding of the actions and behavior of others, we may not be able to have a tool to measure and evaluate ourselves.
We need a clear and accurate picture of ourselves and others to discuss and comment on issues that we have an estimate of their importance, and in the dark, we touch each corner of the elephant.
