Shankar Vedantam

So simply having the video is not gonna be enough to solve these problems and necessarily reduce conflict with the police.

The important thing to understand about social media

The average social media user scrolls through 300 feet of newsfeed a day.

So that means if you have a six inch iPhone or Android, that means you're scrolling down 600 times.

It's the height of the Statue of Liberty.

That's how much you're reading each day.

And so you're not reading things very deeply.

You're just kind of scrolling through and seeing what catches your attention.

That's why they call it attention economy.

We've run a number of studies with hundreds of thousands of people and we found that the language people are using seems to break through in this attention economy.

So when people use powerful, moral, emotional language around political topics, it seems to go more viral.

People are 15 to 20% more likely to share it.

But what happens is who's sharing it?

It's people who are part of your own political in-group.

It doesn't cross over to the other side when you use that language.

And we have a new study out where we found that

The biggest single predictor of making something go viral is dunking on the outgroup, saying something negative about the other side.

And that's 67% more likely to get shared.

And so people learn this by getting reinforced, and they realize this is the language that wins on social media.

Yeah, we've been trying to study what works in terms of fact checking.