Picture this: You’ve been sitting on a couple of pieces of gossip all day and finally the bell rings, indicating that it’s time to go to lunch. You join your friends at the same table you sit at every day and after the usual greetings (“Oh my gosh, I love that shirt!” and “Ughhh, graduation can’t come soon enough”) fade out into the sound of lunch bags being unzipped and Tupperware containers being opened, you spot your opportunity. “You guys won’t believe what I overheard Brad saying to Cynthia when he passed my locker this morning…” you pause as everyone leans in, reveling in the fact that you’ve got everyone’s full attention.
In my experience, social network sites like Twitter can have the same dynamic as the popular girls’ high school lunch table. Someone shares a piece of information and based on a number of factors, like how shocking that information is/how many people initially learned it, it has the chance to ‘go viral,’ whether that means spreading through the rest of the school or earning a trending hashtag. For one of my classes this past spring, I was assigned to spend time on, Twitter, a social media platform that I didn’t have much experience with. Through our interactions with other users on this new site, we were supposed to collect evidence to create an argument of our choice about this platform.
I shook the dust off of the profile I had made in 2015, for the sole purpose of receiving notifications from my high school’s account, with a new profile pic and a short and sweet bio, “living my best life.” Almost immediately I was surprised to find a big difference between the tweets I wrote that got a lot of likes and those that seemed to fall flat. For instance, the tweet I am the proudest of can be seen below:
Not only does this tweet contain a picture of my handsome cat, Kai, but the caption is a reference to one of my all-time favorite movies Monsters Inc. For those of you who don't know, one of the characters in Monsters Inc has to have all of his fur shaved off after a child's sock gets stuck on his back because he has been 'contaminated' by an object from the human world. Even better, someone I don’t know saw this tweet, stayed in theme with the reference, and made my day with the following response:
Hilarious. Comedic gold, if you ask me. However, with 1,866 impressions and 336 total engagements, the performance of this tweet was nowhere close to how many people interacted with another one of my tweets, which sarcastically comments on the ‘scenery’ of my hometown, Findlay, OH.
Yep, that’s an overturned shopping cart in the kind of pile of parking lot snow you only see in March. According to the tweet analytics, people saw this tweet on Twitter 9,629 times, and people interacted with this tweet 1,503 times. That's almost 5x as many interactions are with my previous tweet!
Why was the negative tweet so much more successful?
Well, I found some interesting discourse on this topic on Quora, a public online discussion forum. For instance, the first paragraph of a response to why bad news travels faster than good news from 2018 is below:
Journalism can be compared to the ancient watch of the city. The watch was a man post at the higher point of the city walls to look out the city. If something dangerous was approaching, he will sound the alarm. Normally people blame journalism for reporting “bad news”. But it is not the role of journalism to report “good news”. Yes, journalism could report on good news too, but its authentic role is to prevent society from what could be wrong and put it in danger. If journalism could avoid to report bad news and start to say only good things, it will become a bad journalism.
(MA Digital Communication & Journalism, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana)
While this doesn't directly answer the question of why bad news travels faster than good news, Tahamí argues that at its very core the role of journalism is to report bad news so that people are aware of and can protect themselves from all the dangers in the world. This line of thought very much supports the cliche that "no news is good news." However, I disagree with this approach. I like to think that society has advanced past a point of simply needing a watch to sound the alarm of impending danger. In modern times, I believe that the common goal of journalism should be a pursuit of the truth, whether that truth be an exposé of a political scandal or breaking news on the creation of a new kind of vaccine. More specifically, I think journalists should strive to find the truth as a way to record history (both the good and the bad), to keep people informed of what is happening both globally and locally, and to hold government officials and big corporations accountable for their actions. a
Another commenter takes a closer look at the psychological processes behind our attraction to bad news:
In order for a wonderful question like this to be answered, one must explore the psychological processes of neurotypical humans. According to Psychology Today, for every seventeen negative news reports, there is only one positive report. However, one must keep in mind that the media caters to the interests of its audiences. Therefore, the reason the media is plagued with celebrity scandals, natural disasters, political corruption, and more is because of consumer pessimism, our innate desire for dramatic, negative news.
This stems from our primal desires during the hunter-gatherer era, where negative/threatening news was demanded in the case of possible danger. As animals, our top priority is to survive and if we were to subsist in the wild, any possible threat around us must be known in order to retain our existence. Neurologically, the negative part of the brain is far more sensitive than the positive.
(B.A. English Literature & Journalism,
McGill University)
Gilmar's post goes more into the evolutionary processes that makes us so attracted to negative information. In the hunter-gatherer era, we relied on knowledge of possible threats for survival. Going back to Tahamí's post, the need to constantly be aware of threats is not as present in today's society as it was in ancient times. However, it makes sense evolutionarily how our heightened sensitivity to negative information now represents itself as consumer pessimism. I do find it ironic however that we become overwhelmed by an overabundance of the very same bad news that are brains are so attracted to. Used to be our sensitivity to danger would protect us from a dangerous predator and now they help send us into a session of binge scrolling through upsetting news articles online. How far we've come.
Consider this your reminder to step away from the news every now and then! Delete Instagram/Twitter/Facebook for a couple of days if you need. It is important to recognize that emotional headlines sell. And, it is very easy to get sucked into a scrolling spiral of one piece of 'breaking' news one right after the other. Set aside time to take care of yourself and remember all the positive things you do have in life. No one can carry the sorrows of the world on their shoulders. It's too heavy a weight to bear.