people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they
started with – or to incendiary content in general,’ she wrote in 2018.
[37] These shifting interests mean that unless new content evolves –
becoming more dramatic, more evocative, more surprising – it will
probably get less attention than its predecessors. Here, evolution isn’t
about getting an advantage; it’s about survival.
The same situation arises in the biological world. Many species
have to adapt simply to keep pace with their competitors. After
humans came up with antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, some
bacteria evolved to become resistant to common drugs. In response,
we turned to even stronger antibiotics. This put pressure on bacteria
to evolve further. Treatments gradually became more extreme, just to
have the same impact as lesser drugs did decades earlier.[38] In
biology, this arms race is known as the ‘Red Queen effect’, after the
character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. When Alice
complains that running in the looking-glass world doesn’t take her
anywhere new, the Red Queen replies that, ‘here, you see, it takes all
the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’
This evolutionary running is about change, but it’s also about
transmission. Even if a new mutation crops up in bacteria, it won’t
automatically spread through a human population. Likewise, if new
content emerges online, it’s not a guarantee it will become popular.
We all know of new stories and ideas that have spread widely online,
but we also know of posts – perhaps including our own – that have
fizzled away without notice. So how common is popularity online?
What does a typical outbreak even look like?
T spread gradually at first. On
1 July 2012, Twitter users started speculating that the elusive particle
- nicknamed the ‘God particle’– had finally been discovered.
Originally suggested by Peter Higgs in 1964, the boson was a crucial
missing piece in the subatomic jigsaw. The laws of particle physics
said it should exist, but it was yet to be observed in reality.
That would soon change. The rumours on Twitter initially claimed
that physicists had discovered the boson at the Tevatron particle
accelerator in Illinois. The rumour outbreak grew at a rate of about