Activity: Value statements in what goes viral

12.7. Activity: Value statements in what goes viral#

12.7.1. Choose three scenarios#

When content goes viral there may be many people with a stake in it’s going viral, such as:

  • The person (or people) whose content or actions are going viral, who might want attention, or get financial gain, or might be embarrassed or might get criticism or harassment, etc. Different people involved might have different interests. Some may not have awareness of it happening at all (like a video of an infant).

  • Different audiences might have interests such as curiosity or desire to bring justice to a situation or desire to get attention for themselves or their ideas based on engaging the viral content, or desire to troll or harass others.

  • Social networking platforms might have interests such as increased attention to their platform or increased advertising, or increased or decreased reputation (in views of different audiences).

List at least three different scenarios of content going viral and list out the interests of different groups and people in the content going viral.

12.7.2. Create value statements#

Social media platforms have some ability to influence what goes viral and how (e.g., recommendation algorithms, what actions are available, what data is displayed, etc.), though they only have partial control, since human interaction and organization also play a large role. Still, regardless of whether we can force any particular outcome, we can still consider of what you think would be best for what content should go viral, how much, and in what ways.

Create a set of value statements for when and how you ideally would want content to go viral. Try to come up with at least 10 value statements. We encourage you to consider different ethics frameworks as you try to come up with ideas.

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