The Psychology of Virality: Why Content Spreads Online
Virality ingredients: emotional triggers like awe, anger, or humor; simple shareable message; timely relevance.
What was corrected
Article cited specific institutions, researchers, and statistics for claims about platform feature changes and the Ice Bucket Challenge's virality that could not be verified in any real publication, plus two precise but incorrect details in otherwise real, well-documented studies.
Removed the three unverified citations, generalizing the underlying plausible mechanism without inventing replacement sources; corrected the Berger/Milkman study period to the real three months; corrected the Vosoughi et al. framing of the audience-reach multiple to match the paper's actual reported metric.
Why this is better
Real institutions and well-known real studies were used as anchors for unverified statistics and one factual alteration, the same fabrication pattern found across this batch of legacy articles.