Viralization is a term widely used in connection to social media, to describe online diffusion of content through shares by users: a result of collective behaviour. The term is based on a metaphor, explaining content diffusion by analogy with a contagious virus. While all viruses and illnesses are to be avoided, online viralization may be damaging for the public if misinformation or conspiracy theories are distributed online, but it can be helpful if, for example, a warning about an imminent danger is spread, as in a natural disaster, or if a piece of investigative journalism reaches a wider public. The Cambridge and Merriam-Webster dictionaries do not include the term as such, while “viral” is defined as quickly and widely spread or popularized especially by means of social media, with its derivate “go viral”. The Cambridge Dictionary refers to viral marketing/advertising as the spread of information about a product or service, mainly on the internet. Originating in pre-social media times, the concept of viral marketing turned to viral journalism, seen as “the strategy and tactics to promote quality media stories on the internet in order to gain maximum exposure and sharing”, a phenomenon different from clickbait. Although perceived as organically spread, experts argue that algorithms incentivize content, and can reflect manipulative techniques.
Research on social platforms allows for a closer look at viralization. One study about memes discovered that contagion is affected by social reinforcement (a notion similar to social proof) and homophily. If a meme spreads early on beyond the boundaries of a community of similar accounts, it has a greater chance to become viral and widely known. Yet, most memes are trapped inside a community and spread among similar accounts and are less viral. Another study, on what types of content are more viral, showed that strong emotions lead to physiological arousal, which drives virality – a result close to the hypothesis suggested by French social psychologist Gustave le Bon. Better knowledge of what makes content viral can be used to control the spread of dangerous messages and communicators in distributing public interest messages better. Scientists studied collective behaviour before the internet and social platforms became part of our lives. In 1895 Gustave le Bon published Psychologie des foules, in which he talked about the impulsivity, mobility and irritability of groups of people that can be persuaded to act with one mind and become “barbarians”. More refined theories of social interaction discuss imitative tendencies and collective behaviours. In the 1960s, for example, Stanley Milgram created an experiment on the street, to see how many people look up, if some other people look up – and it worked. The result was labelled “social proof”.
The question of responsibility is important when it comes to harmful manufacture of influence, weaponization of viral content, and misinformation behind viral marketing – conclusions of the Virality Project (at Stanford University) The project analysed Plandemic, a slickly-produced video exploiting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and an illustration of how influencers can be manufactured. Derived from medical pathology, the metaphor is at risk of losing its credibility mostly for medical reasons. Searches for “viral” in its figurative meaning significantly dropped during the Covid-19 pandemic, as people returned to using the original medical term. Experts asked whether it was time to retire the natural virality of content and to consider the term just “a metaphor for the spread of misinformation”, which would put the focus on someone’s responsibility and accountability for mass sharing. A computer virus is a “disguised”, “hidden”, “apparently innocuous” logic, run to perform “a malicious action that propagates by infecting”; when defining viralization, one can also think of the hidden aspects of the so-perceived organic spread of information.
