The Psychology of Virality: Why Content Spreads Online

What has been corrected on this page?

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 29 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   Corrected 3 unverified academic citations (an unverified George Mason University study on Twitter's favorite-to-like button change with an unverified '12 percent secondary sharing' statistic, an unverified Aalborg University study on YouTube's rating system change, and an unverified Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analysis of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge with unverified '3,500 percent increase' and 'viral coefficient of 2.1' figures) and 2 altered details in real, well-known studies (Berger and Milkman's Journal of Marketing Research paper analyzed a three-month period of NYT articles, not six months as stated; Vosoughi, Roy and Aral's Science paper found false political news reached comparable audiences in about a twentieth of the time, not simply '20 times larger' audiences).

   What the page claimed

   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.

   What was corrected

   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: 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.

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