Posting Links On Facebook

One of the things that makes Facebook so vibrant is that it is a very quick and very sure way of spreading information, and if you find a link on the Internet that you want to bring to people’s attention, it is necessary only to tweet that link and sit back as people open and read it, and forward it to others who would be interested. The history of the viral link, although chronologically short, has already got a lot of stories to it, and many of these have been provided by Facebook.

One of the most frequent uses for linking on Facebook is when someone says or does something so incredibly idiotic that it sends the average reader into either a furious rage or gales of laughter. By the medium of Facebook it is possible to pass on a link to this story and share in the derision. It is also possible to bring serious lapses of political, journalistic or moral standards to wider attention.

One of the results of this practice is that the targets of such treatment often respond to the large-scale anger directed at them by insisting that they are the victims of an “orchestrated internet hate campaign”. This misses the point, and is untrue. People pass on the story because they find it distasteful or ridiculous, and it is this that drives the story on, rather than a specific hatred for the person in question. In this cynical world it is not that easy to fabricate outrage, but genuine outrage has a momentum all of its own.

Share and Enjoy

Trending Topics And Their Part In News Gathering

The “trending topic” as used on Facebook has been responsible for generating quite a bit of news over the last year, as Facebook has become a mainstream site like never before. As news media becomes ever more obsessed with “user-generated content”, the major news agencies are using Facebook to see what people are talking about. Where people used to talk about the news, now what people talk about becomes news.

This has become all the more noticeable in the last year. On one notable occasion a minor British politician appeared as a guest on a Fox News show talking about the differences between the American healthcare system being targeted for reform by Barack Obama and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) – describing the British system in quite damning terms. The response from British Facebook users was driven in large part by the Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan who ended a tweet denouncing the politician with the hashtag #welovethenhs – and before too long, there were thousands upon thousands of tweets supporting Linehan.

As the hashtag became a trending topic, the support for the British system became a news story not only in Britain but further afield. Arguments from opponents of healthcare reform that under the NHS, a figure like Professor Stephen Hawking would never have lived to the age he has, were picked up on Facebook and denounced by people pointing out that Professor Hawking was born and had lived most of his life in Britain, and would have died without the NHS. The “trending topic” became the news, and there are other examples of this, too.

Share and Enjoy