Before the internet, “going viral” was not something positive much less something people actively sought out. “Going viral” has become a new age epidemic, with people doing whatever they can for their 60 seconds of fame. But what does “going viral” actually mean, and how does it affect our brains and our self-esteem? Today’s GKIS article will break down “going viral” and its effects. For help raising your child to be digitally smart, check out our GKIS Screen Safety Essentials Course. This course includes all GKIS parenting courses, agreements, and supplements, ensuring you are well-equipped to fight off digital injury and keep your child safe from harm.
What does it mean to “go viral”?
Going viral means sharing something via social media that spreads quickly to thousands, even millions of people. The term viral video was first used in 2009 to describe the video “David After Dentist.”[1]
One viral video or post can turn people into internet celebrities overnight and garner thousands of followers, resulting in brand deals and monetized content. Once a video goes viral, there is no limit to the number of people it will reach or even what platform they will see the video on. It is very common to see posts shared from one platform to the next, whether it be a TikTok on Twitter or a Tweet going viral on Instagram.
The number of views to be considered going viral also varies from platform to platform. One hundred thousand views on TikTok is pretty successful, whereas even a couple hundred thousand views on YouTube is a relatively low number.[2]
The number of likes is also an important factor. Many videos have a high number of views but a relatively low number of likes. These videos are not considered to be going viral because they are not well-received by the general public.[2] Engagement drives up the virality of the content through shares and comments that stimulate the algorithm to continue placing that content on people’s feeds.[2] Another important factor in going viral is the immediacy of response, meaning that the views, likes, and comments must be received within a few hours to days rather than over several months or years.[2]
How does “going viral” affect our brains?
When your video, post, or other content “goes viral,” you receive likes, comments, reposts, shares, and bookmarks. These response notifications prompt the reward systems in our brains.[3] Many fast notifications results in dopamine release. To keep that feel-good feeling going, we keep checking, acting in a way similar to gambling addictions.[3]
Algorithms also take advantage of a variable-reward system because they are programmed to recognize when to take advantage of our reward system and desire for dopamine.[3] This often results in a stockpile of notifications that get delayed until a good amount of time since the last check has passed or a large amount of engagement has accumulated.
For a personal insight into going viral, I interviewed a college student who had recently experienced the sensation of going viral. They said, “I recently had a video go viral on TikTok. It was a video of the Indie-Rock band Boygenius and one of their members, singer Phoebe Bridgers, singing a verse from their song ‘Cool About It.’ I had taken the video at a concert I had recently attended and decided to post it on TikTok since I was lucky enough to be pretty close to the stage. Over the next few days after I posted it, it got 118k views, 32k likes, and 500 comments, and was saved by more than 4000 people. Once it started picking up traction, I became obsessed with checking my notifications and seeing all the new comments. I would constantly look to see how many views I was at each hour. I even got a like from a TikTok creator who I really enjoy so that was very exciting for me.”
Although going viral is thrilling, notifications can be harmful when they are overly distracting.[4] To compensate for smartphone interruptions, studies have shown that people often work faster, resulting in more stress, frustration, time pressure, and effort.[4] Research has linked daily notifications and their interruptions to depression, anxiety, and even symptoms associated with ADHD.[5]
Our interview also revealed that the euphoria of going viral is short-lived and needs constant “re-upping.” Our subject elaborated, “Once the video started to die down though, I got annoyed by the notifications. They were distracting because they were so far and few in-between and nothing quite as exciting as the start. I got kinda sad that my viral moment was dying down. It made me want to post another video to see if it would get the same kind of attention.”
What does “going viral” do to our self-esteem?
Studies have shown that social media can be both detrimental to our self-esteem and boost it at the same time, but how does going viral change that?
Social media usage can add stress to daily life and encourage people to constantly evaluate and compare themselves to others.[6] When someone goes viral, they open themselves up to being judged by thousands of people, some of whom can be cruel, feeling emboldened by the veil of anonymity. While many would agree that the likes and views one receives on a viral post boosts their self-esteem and makes one feel good about themselves, it also allows for internet trolls to make their way into the comment section to bait others into an argument or provoke an emotional reaction.[7]
One-in-five internet users that have been victims of harassment online reported that it happened in the comment section of a website.[8] Reading negative comments can lessen confidence, reduce self-esteem, and depending on the severity, can even provoke suicidal thoughts.[9]
Our GKIS interviewee unfortunately also had experience with the negative side of going viral. They reported, “Before my video went super viral, I had posted another video that didn’t get as many views but still got a couple thousand views, a few hundred likes, and a good amount of comments. The video was clips of my girlfriend and me in celebration of our second anniversary. For the most part, the comments were really nice, with people calling us cute and being supportive. But after a little while of it being up, it got to the wrong side of TikTok. As a queer couple, we’re used to people being rude or staring at us, but to get negative comments just hurt more for some reason. This was a few months ago, but I still think about the comments from time to time. It honestly made me want to delete the whole video even though it was just a few comments out of a bunch of nice ones.”
How Parents Can Help
Understand that what you and your child post has the potential to go viral, even if you don’t want it to.
Set the privacy settings on posts to control who gets to see the content you share.
Prevent a digital injury to your child’s self-esteem before it occurs with our GKIS Screen Safety Toolkit for parents of kids of all ages.
To help facilitate difficult conversations about online content and who should see it, try out our free GKIS Connected Family Screen Agreement.
Who (or what) makes the content your kids watch on YouTube? In some cases, it’s hard-working creators who strive to make quality videos for entertainment or education. In other cases, it’s a computer program designed to efficiently produce videos for a lot of views and big profit. With this in mind, it is up to parents to ensure that their kids have a safe and fun experience while online. For helpful and empowering tools to establish a safe screen home environment, check out our Screen Safety Essentials Course. Today’s GKIS article tells you what you need to know to make YouTube viewing safer for your kids.
Bots!
Bots are computer programs designed by people or other bots to carry out specific online tasks. Not all bots are bad. However, they can run without any oversight from an actual human being.
One application for bots is creating YouTube videos for kids. More specifically, in this capacity bots combine video segments and post them over and over to test how many views they get. Once the tests are completed, the bot has created and run videos that ultimately make money for the programmer. Now that’s artificial intelligence!
Bot-Made Videos
Bot-made videos can look like a normal kid’s video, but they are typically a bit stranger. They often contain just enough story to string the randomly chosen segments together, but not enough story for everything happening to make logical sense. There are just enough familiar elements to hold a child’s attention but nothing educational or valuable to a child.
These videos distract kids long enough to get them to view ads and may even cause harm. After all, many times a human’s eyes have not viewed the video, and bots can’t discriminate a harmful video from a harmless one. At a glance, parents can’t discriminate either. Plus, most parents simply don’t take the time to preview thousands of videos their kids browse each day – especially from beginning to end.
Using Branded Characters to Bail Kids
One element that gets kids searching and watching are recognizable characters. Although branded characters are used without permission and are placed in a disjointed storyline for the video, kids will select them and stay entrapped expecting entertainment. For example, in her book Screen Time in the Mean Time, Dr. Bennett describes an alarming video portraying popular kid’s cartoon character, Peppa the Pig, screaming while being tortured in a dentist’s chair. The beginning of the video looks like a regular Peppa the Pig story. But near the middle of it, the story takes a confusing, terrible turn. Inappropriate video content make be shocking and even funny to older kids but vulnerable young children don’t have the insight or sophisticated skill set to look away. This can feel like a violent ambush and result in confusion, shame, and trauma.
Auto-play
Kids don’t always view these videos because they searched out the characters. Sometimes it is offered to them automatically in their feed. Auto-play is a YouTube feature where a new video is automatically
started after the one currently playing ends. Auto-play will select a video that is similar to the one you just watched based on tags that content creators mark their videos with when they post them. If auto-play is left on too long, it can lead a viewer down a rabbit hole of similar but stranger and stranger videos until they fall into bot-generated content.
The Algorithm
Unfortunately, bot-made videos and more can slip onto YouTube relatively easily. The huge volume of content uploaded to YouTube every day means that having a human being review every video uploaded to the site would be impossible. Instead, YouTube has another way to filter the content uploaded to its site, a bot of their own.
YouTube’s algorithm is, in essence, a much more advanced form of a bot that can scan through every video as it’s uploaded and automatically flag anything that violates YouTube’s terms of service, or at least that’s what it’s supposed to do. Unfortunately, YouTube’s algorithm can’t detect every inconsistency. It’s looking for the very specific things it was programmed to look for. Videos that don’t contain these specific violations slip by the filters. Many content creators have learned what exactly the algorithm is looking for, and some of them use it to slip inappropriate content past the sensors.
YouTube’s algorithm is also responsible for other features on the site including auto-play. The algorithm is what decides what’s worth showing next after a video, and what isn’t. However, the algorithm is only capable of discerning what videos are similar to others based on the tags assigned to a video. If a bot learns to place all the relevant tags for child content on an automatically generated video, then the algorithm will suggest it as if it were normal child content.
What can you do about bot content?
There are a few things that you as a parent can do to protect your children from bot-generated content:
Check in on your kids when they’re watching YouTube
So you can be sure the algorithm hasn’t drifted too far away from where it started.
Get Help
Monitoring everything your child watches can be a daunting task GKIS is here to help. Our Social Media Readiness Course is designed to teach your tweens or teens how to spot red flags on social media sites and when they’re gaming.
Turn off auto-play
The auto-play feature can be disabled by clicking the auto-play button at the bottom of YouTube videos. The button appears as a small black and white play button and is replaced by a black and white pause button while disabled. By turning off this feature, YouTube will no longer pick the next video your child watches next and instead will wait for you to manually choose the next video.
Limit your child’s time on YouTube
The bot-generated content of YouTube is at the bottom of the algorithm’s list of choices. Children often end up being presented with bot-generated content after spending too much time watching videos on YouTube. Our Connected Family Course has screen management strategies and safe-screen home setup ideas to help you manage your child’s screen time.
If you do catch your kids being exposed to an inappropriate video, report it.
Videos reported to YouTube as inappropriate are reviewed by real people who can catch the video for what it is. An offending video will be deleted permanently and can get the channel it comes from deleted entirely.
Thanks to CSUCI intern, Jason T. Stewart for researching bot-generated content and co-authoring this article.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Have you seen the Britt McHenry video? It’s gone viral, and like the millions of shares and comments suggest, this young woman’s poised and piercing delivery of cruel insults has made our collective blood boil. I’m angry that Ms. McHenry stooped to this level annihilating another person. On the other hand, as a human being with emotions myself, I’ve left my loved ones in tatters due to my sharp tongue on shameful occasion. Most importantly, what this video speaks to is two modern day phenomena gone viral, using social media as a weapon for public shaming and how reality TV is shaping entitled and ruthless behavior.
The tow truck company’s bullying video pulls for an old lady rant complete with “kids these days.” But rather than jump on the indignant public shaming band wagon of “I’d never,” I think it’s more productive to reflect on how did she get to that point and what does this mean for the rest of us? Is Britt showing us the behavior of a uniquely entitled celebrity who has lost her social skills due to too much pampering and exaggerated accolades? Or is she mimicking a practiced script too frequently performed by reality TV stars, deliciously sprinkled with venom for the greedy consumption of a morally lazy viewing audience?
First I feel compelled to confess that, like all of us, I am not a perfect person. I still joke about the day I lost my s$%t and uttered the arrogant words, “I’ll sue you’re a$$” to a moving company owner. I swear I actually said that. And to this day I blush at the memory, a blush that squeezes my heart in shame and resulted in a valuable personal lesson about crisis management.
The short story is that on a stressful day in my privileged life a moving company had a truck full of our worldly belongings parked at the bottom of our steep driveway, unable to proceed due to inadequate bumper clearance. With a baby on my hip and the exhaustion of a mother spearheading a big move with not enough help, I was on the phone with the owner. With an almost amused voice, the guy was telling me that, despite his personal recommendation his trucks could clear the driveway and a written quote, I was going to have to pay more money for more trucks and time-and-a-half for his guys in order to complete the move. If I refused to cough up the cash immediately they were going to park the full truck in a warehouse until I ponied up the cash. Believe me, I was outraged. I pleaded then I threatened. Ultimately, after my totally impotent sue threat, I hung up in tears and my husband tag-teamed the event and worked it through to a resolution.
Even ten years later I think I was justified for being enraged. The poor moving guys walking on eggshells in my living room sheepishly apologized, saying, “Mam I’m so sorry. I don’t blame you a bit.” And thank goodness I was kind to them. Ultimately we paid the extra money and our stuff got delivered and that was the end of that. But my point is not to tell you my story of woe, but rather to say that we all know what it’s like to feel helpless and trapped. And these moments test us like no others. These moments offer us the opportunity to rise to our best or dive into to our worst.
Perhaps that is where Ms. McHenry was that day. Or, maybe she’s a monster on frequent occasion. But at what point does our bandwagon shaming go too far? I think what we are all responding to is the Kim Kardassian-like poise with which she lands her demeaning elitist insults. It reeks of practice and shamelessness. Please somebody tell me that she was mortified by herself the second she walked out that door. That her apology had personal substance rather than the flippant result of hired PR. As a champion of the victimized and, on occasion, the predators in my psychology practice, I can tell you that anything’s possible. But what can each of us take from this?
I personally intend to have a discussion with my little ones at home. I’m going to tell them about Ms. McHenry and ask my kids what they think about the incident. Should we compassionately forgive her for being a venomous bully or should we carry on like an unraveled lynch mob? Like most life lessons, I suppose moderation is in order. Perhaps we should consider that she was in a terribly stressful situation where she felt trapped and out of control. That she probably has little experience with true hardship, and she has a ton of learning to do before she is capable of Martin Luther King-level understanding and kindness. That humbling experiences like these are the foundation of true wisdom, and that usually only comes with maturity and experience. One day Britt will realize that it wasn’t her brain, teeth, or college degree that is responsible for her success, it was the kindness of others.
Last weekend my 13 year old got her first treat to a nice hotel and room service alone with her Mom for a volleyball tournament. I was super excited to give this gift to her and asked, “Honey, anything else you want from the menu.” My feisty, bright, clever daughter looked at me with mischief in her eye and with her best arrogant accent she drawled, “Mummy, I want a pony.” We both burst into giggles at her clever observation and per her usual, she astounded me with her insight.
In conclusion, it turns out that learning can only take place through hardship and effort. Failure rather than achievement is when we start to grow. I propose to the reader that we each thoughtfully reflect upon our willingness to gleefully join the shame mob. Instead, perhaps we could each take a sacred moment out everyday to be grateful for what we have and try to share that bounty with those whom are the easiest to ignore. Because causing a joy riot from connection at a stressful moment will feed the soul, while a hurtful tantrum will kill it slowly.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
Thanks to CSUCI intern, Katherine Carroll for researching “going viral” and its effect on the brain and self-esteem.
