Being Right isn’t Enough to Go Viral. Here’s What Is.

In my last post, I explored how people’s anger about AI data centers is disproportionately high compared to the water waste from factory farming. This myth isn’t the only environmental statement that punched above its weight class — remember that summer when we all collectively decided to ban plastic straws to save the oceans? Yeah, plastic straws, those little buggers that make up less than 0.03% of the plastic being dumped into the seas? Or gas stoves? Or ‘save the bees’?

We’ve all been through this song-and-dance before. There will always be some stat or narrative that breaks into the mainstream despite being super misleading, distracting, or just outright wrong. Bemoaning this phenomenon isn’t going to stop it. Instead, I would rather think critically about fact transmission so we can apply these lessons to meat reduction.

To do so, I went looking for what actually makes a fact travel. Here’s what I found.

Despite decades of narrative work from animal rights and climate groups, people still have completely misinformed ideas of the reality of animal agriculture. Most people just don’t really understand the scale of the issue we are dealing with, arguably the largest moral catastrophe on Earth today:

Even more frustrating than the lack of awareness is blatant misinformation that has seeped into the public consciousness: that vegan leather is greenwashing, that “ultra-processed” is a meaningful food category, that eating local matters more than eating plant-based, that regenerative ag is a scalable solution, that soy raises estrogen — take your pick.

Stopping these ‘zombie facts’ feels like a Sisyphean game of whack-a-mole. First of all, fact-checking takes forever: it takes way longer to correct a falsehood than to invent one, something I know all too well after spending hours crunching data in my previous post. Secondly, being fact-checked doesn’t always update people’s knowledge — and when it does, it might not change their underlying feelings towards the issue. Sometimes people cede the fact but not the argument1, even if the fact was load-bearing. And people just don’t like being fact-checked and often avoid information that might correct them.

Debunking falsehoods is playing defense. Important, yes, but we’re ceding an entire narrative arena to our opponents instead of seeding the ground with better-chosen facts:

In 2015, researchers ran a scientific game of telephone: they showed people urban legends chock-full of eye-catching details: think spiders, steroids, cybersex, indecent exposure, and serial killers. Each person wrote a summary of the story, then handed that summary to the next person, who did the exact same thing, and on it went. The researchers then studied how the stories changed as they were retold. Unsurprisingly, lots of nuance was stripped away, like how, in one story, the word “apparently” vanished entirely, making an important point into a hardened fact instead of a guess.

Experiments like these help us to understand what types of facts are likely to persist over time and which ones fade away into obscurity. After reading a bunch of these papers, I’ve created a framework for understanding what types of facts are ripe for virality:

• Poses a threat, ideally to the reader or their community

• Involves disgust: contamination, bodies, or food

• Evokes a high-arousal2 emotion like fear, disgust, anger

• Names a them, a face to blame

• Stays social — about people, norms, who did what to whom

• Makes the sharer look smart, moral, in-the-know, or otherwise improves their reputation

• Breaks one rule of how the world works — one rule, not ten

• Rides on a round, simple number that survives a retelling (”ten miles,” “90%”)

• Goes down easy — claims that are simple to process feel truer, and truer still each time they’re repeated

• Feels novel to the audience

• Picks up a citable-looking source early

From this list, it’s easy to see why the AI-water myth caught fire: it has a clear claim that survives a game of telephone (“one bottle of water is one AI email”), that makes people angry, feel threatened, and has a clear villain: Big Tech. It doesn’t hurt that it’s a form of high-brow misinformation that grants people status for sharing it.

At first glance, many animal ag stats should also fit these criteria. Here’s how I think we can frame them better to make them really stick.

Contrary to Inside Out, sadness might actually be overrated. Many narratives around animal welfare evoke low-arousal emotions like sadness, when stories around anger are more likely to proliferate. I suspect this is because many activists are themselves driven by grief and empathy, so they spread stories that resonate with them. But sad stories of a chicken with an injured leg don’t go viral.

Remember the story of Cedar the goat — the poor animal who was unjustly stolen from her human and subsequently killed and eaten? Or Cecil the lion or Peanut the squirrel or Freya the walrus or Harambe the gorilla? These stories went everywhere, due in part to how god-damn angry they make you feel3. High-energy emotions trump low-energy ones every time.

• Invoke fear: 70% of medically important antibiotics in the U.S. go to farmed animals, fueling concerns about antibiotic resistance

• Stoke disgust: fast-growth breeding has left the vast majority of supermarket chicken breasts with muscle disorders like white striping and “woody breast”

• Make people angry: people living near concentrated animal feeding operations face documented respiratory problems

Quick, can you name the CEO of a meat company? I’d bet no4. But I’m 100% confident you can name an AI CEO or executive: Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, or Elon Musk come to mind pretty easily.

We should all act more like reality TV producers and cast villains. A “them” turns meat-eaters into an “us,” and gives the movement something to recruit against rather than someone to scold. This also solves another problem for virality: conveying status to the fact-sharer. A major problem in animal advocacy is that merely talking about the issues transforms you into a “preachy vegan” and makes people resent you. By explicitly naming an out-group, you may be able to foster solidarity and gain trust.

I don’t think this should be too difficult really — these CEOs ain’t no saints either. The meat industry5 is filled with stories of corrupt officials employing children on slaughterhouse floors illegally, bribing politicians, fixing prices, breaking anti-trust laws, and even betting on which employees would get sick from COVID-19. I often read meat industry blogs and news articles, so I counted how many of them reference some sort of scandal or issue that would generate negative press6. Of the 1,000 articles I reviewed, 300 referenced a scandal or problem — and this is on their own blog posts. Here are the types of things they mentioned:

Animal agriculture is terrible in basically every way a thing can be terrible. Bad for the planet, bad for animals, bad for the economy, bad for pandemic risk, bad for human health, bad for workers’ rights… It’s just bad, full stop. But this is more of a curse than a blessing, because it creates a narrative that’s too difficult to stick in your brain.

If you had to explain an animal ag story to your aunt (while she’s three lemon spritzers deep into a family dinner), could she repeat it the next day? Most of our best facts wouldn’t: they’re accurate but forgettable. “Regardless of the way it’s produced, beef has a substantially higher lifecycle emissions profile than plant protein, even more if you count land use change” is something that’ll slip away the second dessert is served. But “a single burger emits the same as driving ten miles” might just stick around.

To paraphrase Coco Chanel — before you publish the report, take one fact off. One thing I like about the recent Project Slingshot campaigns is how each one centers around a single concept. Their launch campaign, “I Don’t Buy It,” runs on essentially one line: 90% of pigs in the UK are slaughtered in CO2 gas chambers. Now we’re talking. This is the type of thing that has the potential to survive in your brain long enough to go viral.

In a study of Twitter misinformation, the factor the researchers zeroed in on as the biggest predictor of why false news outran the truth was how novel it felt. Crucially, novelty is subjective — something that might feel stale to you may feel brand-new to the general public.

To prioritize novelty, we need to understand our audience’s perceptions of the issues. Some underexplored angles that might land as brand-new: that the shrimp industry blinds its breeding females to make them spawn, how we kill birds with heatstroke to prevent bird flu, or that nearly every chicken on Earth descends from two companies’ genetics. More research into the salience of these facts would certainly help us select them better.

Things that are always novel are about current events: this is one of the reasons I think opposition to the ”Save Our Bacon Act” got so strong; this is a current, fresh issue instead of a well-trodden debate about welfare. So whenever you see an animal issue in the mainstream, latch onto it to ride its novelty.

The facts are on our side. It’s undeniably true that billions of individuals are suffering in animal factories, that animal agriculture is polluting our land and rivers, and that moving away from an animal-based food system would reap benefits for our health. Our problem has never been a shortage of damning facts. It’s that we keep presenting them like a lab report and expecting them to resonate like a scandal.

Instead of throwing everything against a wall and seeing what sticks, we can use our understanding of virality to carefully select facts that are more likely to break into the mainstream. Plenty of disinformation or highly misleading stats have done so already — it’s high time we start playing the same game.