Letters to the Public: What Goes Viral Online?
Thomas Wold
SAGE Open, 2023, vol. 13, issue 1, 21582440231155412
Abstract:
Social media posts made by ordinary people are in most cases only viewed by a small number of friends and contacts. But some posts get thousands of likes, comments, and shares, a phenomenon often dubbed as going viral. This paper provides a content analysis of viral Facebook posts published by common people in Norway, and of the news coverage they received. The social media posts that go viral in Norway deal with a variety of topics, like health care, elderly care, bullying, traffic safety, unemployment, animal welfare, school, and education. Some of the viral posts were open job applications, and some were creative expressions. Many of the posts address political issues, and becomes part of the public debate. The posts are personal in their mode of address, often with an emotional appeal for civic engagement. They resemble the letters to the editor, though they bypass the editor and go directly to online self-publication, and in this way, moving parts of the public debate from the newspapers to social media. Most of the viral posts got news coverage, which in most cases focused more on the popularity cues and the virality of the post, and less on the topic the post addressed.
Keywords: social media; user-generated content; virality; content analysis; journalism; mass communication; communication; social sciences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440231155412 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:13:y:2023:i:1:p:21582440231155412
DOI: 10.1177/21582440231155412
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications (sagediscovery@sagepub.com).