Category
Virality is a property of the spread, not of the content — and while some characteristics reliably increase the odds, the outcome is dominated by chance to a degree that makes reliable engineering
Much less than they used to, and what they do now varies enormously by platform — because the problem they were invented to solve has largely been solved by other means. What hashtags were for. In an
Inconsistently — through a patchwork of platform policies and national law that varies enormously by country, and in many places the rules governing political advertising online are considerably
Because the public feed became a bad place to talk — and the shift toward private and semi-private spaces is one of the most significant changes in how people actually use the internet, even though
Buying and selling inside a social app rather than clicking through to a retailer's website — and platforms are pushing it because it solves their two biggest commercial problems at once. Why
Not completely — but you can remove a great deal more than most people assume, and the gap between "deleted" and "no longer findable" is where the practical work happens. Why complete deletion is
Because the mechanics of social platforms convert individually reasonable actions into a collectively disproportionate one — and almost nobody involved experiences themselves as part of a mob. The
Because platforms have restricted or withdrawn the access that independent research depended on — and this happened while the questions researchers are asked to answer became more consequential. What
Speed, accuracy and a genuine response — and the most common failures are predictable enough that avoiding them accounts for most of the improvement available. What makes a crisis different from
Monitoring what is said about a brand, sector or topic across public online conversation — and it is distinguished from simple monitoring by what is done with the result: analysis of themes over time
Builds and maintains the relationship between an organisation and the people who gather around it — a role frequently confused with social media management, and genuinely distinct from it. The
Controlling what content an advertisement appears alongside, so that a brand is not associated with material that damages it — a concern created by programmatic advertising, where the advertiser does
Where the content is published, and what is being bought. Influencer content is posted on the creator's own channel to their audience; user-generated content (UGC) is created for a brand to use on
Through patterns that are difficult to fake convincingly at scale — and the signals are consistent enough that auditing an account is genuinely possible without specialist tools. The most informative
A group of accounts that agree to interact with each other's posts — liking, commenting and sharing on a reciprocal basis — in order to signal popularity to a platform's ranking system. How they
Bands of follower count used by marketers to categorise creators — with no formal standard, so the boundaries differ between agencies, and the more useful finding is that the smaller tiers frequently
A following feed shows content from accounts you chose. A for you feed shows content the platform predicts you will engage with, mostly from accounts you have never heard of. The difference is who
Because generating it costs almost nothing, recommendation systems reward engagement rather than quality, and the two facts together make mass-produced content economically rational. The economics.
Because a link takes the user off the platform, and platforms are optimised to keep people on it — so outbound links are ranked down, whether or not anyone says so explicitly. The incentive, stated
Context collapse is what happens when audiences that would normally be separate are flattened into one, so a single message reaches your colleagues, your family, your school friends and strangers
Generally no — and that asymmetry is the central economic fact of being a creator on someone else's platform. What you can usually export. Most large platforms provide a data download containing your
They are escalating enforcement actions with different targets: a takedown hits content, a strike hits your standing, and a ban hits your account. Content removal (takedown). A specific post, video
Partially, and the evidence points to a consistent pattern: they are reasonably accurate but too slow, and their weakest point is exactly where misinformation does most of its damage. How the
A model where many independently operated servers interconnect, so users on different servers can follow and reply to each other — like email, where a Gmail user and an Outlook user communicate