Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves

by Christian Rudder

Facebook’s data team investigated their version of the phenomenon, tracing the evolution of a single status update from the health-care debates in 2009 through the network: No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day. This was reposted, verbatim, more than 470,000 times and also spawned 121,605 different variants, which themselves received about 800,000 more posts. Someone who didn’t quite feel that the update spoke for him would change it slightly, and versions spread outward into different social circles. When you put each version against the political bias of the people posting it (–2.0 is maximally liberal, +2.0 conservative), not only do you get an interesting look at the American political spectrum—extremes of right and left, plus a center that has opted-out of the discussion—but you also see how political belief translates into words. People at the top and bottom of this list use the same framework to speak at cross-purposes: