News Companies know that women share more content than men, use social media more, and that people are primarily motivated to share if something makes them angry.Many news sites seem to push stories that would make women feel like victims. The reason may be simple, it will generate shares and make them money.Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Many people feel like activists have infiltrated the news media, and that many of these organizations are pushing a feminist, progressive agenda. | ||
| And while it may be true that there are activists in media, and they do often push a feminist, progressive, or left-wing agenda, there are different reasons for it. | ||
| I'll admit, absolutely, activist journalists exist, and they will smear people for ideological reasons, they will lie for ideological reasons. | ||
| But let me tell you a story about marketing. | ||
| A few years ago, I was talking to a marketing consultant. | ||
| And I asked them, why was it so many of these companies, these new digital media companies, are feminist and progressive? | ||
| And he said, there's a few simple reasons. | ||
| For one, women share more than men. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And the reason people share, for the most part, is if something makes them feel. | ||
| And not only that, anger is the most likely to get someone to share content. | ||
| That means making women angry is your best path to generating revenue. | ||
| And it would seem that a lot of this data might actually be true. | ||
| So let's look at the data. | ||
| Does it actually show that women are more likely to share content? | ||
| That angry women are more likely to share content? | ||
| And if that's the case, is this why so many news organizations are progressive feminists? | ||
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| This is my job. | ||
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| A couple days ago... | ||
| I did a story on this article from BuzzFeed. | ||
| It says, The Accused. | ||
| The headline reads, Vulnerable women are routinely prosecuted and imprisoned for false rape claims in the UK. | ||
| The story is pretty defensive of women who have been proven to have filed false rape claims. | ||
| In one instance, phone records proved a man could not have committed these attacks. | ||
| The woman is said to have hurt herself. | ||
| And I had to wonder, why is BuzzFeed defending convicted criminals? | ||
| And I started thinking that maybe it's because the goal is to paint women as victims so that women will share the content, thinking back to the story I was told by those marketing consultants. | ||
| So let's look at some of this data. | ||
| A website called Social Media Explorer Take it with a grain of salt, I'm not familiar with their work, and this could be speculation, but they do have a lot of information about why people share. | ||
| The first section is titled, The Gender Gap. | ||
| Women share more than men, especially on a daily basis. | ||
| As far as frequency of sharing, 30% of women report sharing content at least once a day, with 7 out of 10 of those women sharing multiple times a day. | ||
| Meanwhile, half of men reported sharing multiple times a week, but only 5 out of 10 of those men share on a daily basis. | ||
| Ultimately, women are 26% more likely to share content more than once a day compared with men. | ||
| But why are both genders sharing content in the first place? | ||
| Men are less diversified in their sharing motivations. | ||
| For both men and women, the primary reason for sharing is overwhelmingly to entertain their friends with interesting content. | ||
| While over half of men cite entertainment as the main reason, women came in nearly 20% lower, suggesting they're more diversified in their primary motivations. | ||
| Compared with men, women were 22% more likely to cite expressing themselves to their friends with things they care about, and 37% more likely to cite eliciting an emotional response from their network as primary sharing motivation. | ||
| To put it plainly, women are much more likely to share than men, and they are 37% more likely to share because someone elicited an emotional response. | ||
| So is it any surprise then that media companies are going to crank out story after story painting women as victims and pandering to things that will make women angry in order to get them to share something that makes them emote or so these women can show this is what they care about? | ||
| Brandwatch has a story from March 25th, 2014. | ||
| Who runs the social media world? | ||
| Men or women? | ||
| Women use social media more often. | ||
| 30% of online U.S. | ||
| women check their social sites several times a day versus 26% of online U.S. | ||
| men. | ||
| Women interact with brands more often. | ||
| 55% of online U.S. | ||
| women access deals compared to just 36% of online U.S. | ||
|
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men. | |
| 58% of those who consume news in social media are women. | ||
| Let me repeat this. | ||
| 58% of those who consume news in social media are women. | ||
| Two very important data points. | ||
| That women are the primary demographic that consumes news on social media. | ||
| So if you are starting a news company, who are you going to make content for? | ||
| Men or women? | ||
| Well, if you target women, your demographic will be larger. | ||
| But equally as important is that women interact with brands more often. | ||
| 55% versus only 36% of men. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Advertisers will be more interested in articles that target women than they do men because their click-through rate will likely be higher among women. | ||
| It is possible these brands, these companies, will make more money if they produce content targeting women. | ||
| Heading over to Pew Internet Research gives us a little bit more data. | ||
| Women use Facebook more than men. | ||
| They use Instagram more than men. | ||
| They are equal on LinkedIn, which is business-oriented. | ||
| But they are still more active on Twitter. | ||
| When it comes to social media sites, Facebook is the most important. | ||
| This story from August 18, 2015. | ||
| Facebook has taken over from Google as a traffic source for news. | ||
| The article from Fortune cites Parsley, which shows that Facebook is the largest driver of traffic to news websites surpassing Google. | ||
| And although recently that may have flipped this story from Recode, Google is replacing Facebook's traffic to publishers, it's important to realize that Facebook is still one of the largest sources of traffic for these news websites. | ||
| Many of these sites already have search engine optimization to make sure that if you search on Google, you will find their news site. | ||
| But even if Facebook is waning in terms of dominance for driving traffic to their site, they're still going to heavily prioritize getting shares in order to get those views. | ||
| In which case, women being the primary sharers of information, being the primary users of social media, they're going to be the likely target for many news organizations. | ||
| Looking at the American Marketing Association website, we can see this article from August of 2017. | ||
| They say content that triggered certain emotions was especially likely to go viral. | ||
| Specifically, content that made people angry was the most likely to go viral, with a 34% greater chance than average. | ||
| Content that was awe-inspiring was second, at 30% greater than average. | ||
| Content that inspired feelings of sadness, as the researchers predicted, was less likely to go viral, actually 13% below average. | ||
| So there's the data. | ||
| Not only do women share more than men, not only are they more active on most social media, especially where it matters, they are more likely to share if something makes them feel, or to show their friends and family what they care about. | ||
| And when we look at the data that says anger is the most likely emotion to get someone to share, it is unsurprising that so many news organizations are producing content to piss women off. | ||
| The results can be fairly obvious. | ||
| This story from Vox.com just last month. | ||
| Republicans have a millennial women problem. | ||
| Nearly 70% of young women say they are leaning toward Democratic candidates in the midterms. | ||
| Now, Vox cites Pew Internet Research and they show us this graphic. | ||
| By wide margin, young women favor the Democratic candidate in their district. | ||
| And we can see, among ages 18 to 34, women are 68% Democratic and only 24% Republican. | ||
| Whereas men are 47% Democratic and 50% Republican. | ||
| Now, men are pretty evenly split, but they do lean towards Republican. | ||
| And women overwhelmingly lean Democratic. | ||
| The trend is fairly similar among ages 35 to 49, but the gap is a bit lower for women. | ||
| with fifty two percent of women being democratic and thirty six percent being republican although the numbers are fairly similar for men but it would seem that among ages thirty five to forty nine some men don't move over to the republicans but probably go third party because they're nearly ten points down On the Democratic side. | ||
| But you want to ask me why I think today millennial men lean Republican a little bit and women overwhelmingly lean Democratic? | ||
| A few reasons. | ||
| A lot of content degrades men, says that they're oppressors, that they're toxic, and things like that. | ||
| When a young man reads that, he's probably going to get angry or offended and be put off. | ||
| This is not going to make them share the content because it's not something they care about. | ||
| Not only that, men don't really share that often because they care. | ||
| They share to entertain their friends. | ||
| So, in effect, what we see is bubbles forming where men are getting angry that they're being attacked and don't really want to share this kind of stuff anyway, and women do want to share this because they feel like they're being attacked and they care about it. | ||
| When more and more women share some of the same content, and more media companies realize their biggest demographic is going to be angry women, they're going to produce more content to target this demographic, thus creating a downward spiral of angrier and angrier and more extreme content to the point where I honestly don't think it's that surprising to see most millennial women lean left. | ||
| On Wikipedia, there's an article called Gender and Emotional Expression. | ||
| It says, many psychologists reject the notion that men actually experience emotions less frequently than women do. | ||
| Instead, researchers have suggested that men exhibit restrictive emotionality. | ||
| Restrictive emotionality refers to a tendency to inhibit the expression of certain emotions and an unwillingness to self-disclose intimate feelings. | ||
| I'm not a psychologist. | ||
| I'm not an expert. | ||
| You're basically getting my thoughts and opinions based on the facts that I've read and the things I've been told throughout the past several years. | ||
| But when I read this, what it says to me is, when a man is attacked on social media, he is less likely to share it for many reasons as I've already outlined. | ||
| But also, when we consider that men experience restrictive emotionality, meaning they don't want to share certain things that make them feel certain ways, they are even less likely to share content that attacks or degrades them. | ||
| If someone shares an article insulting women, they'll post it arguing and fighting back. | ||
| But in my opinion, many men don't want to share things because they either don't want to look weak, or they feel like it won't benefit them in any way to look like someone who's complaining. | ||
| Not only that, when men do bring up stories about how they are facing adversity, they're called man babies, they're insulted, They're insulted as MRAs and incels and other things like that. | ||
| What incentive does a man have to actually share content that makes them angry? | ||
| Which brings me back to the first story I referenced. | ||
| BuzzFeed News, the accused. | ||
| Why do I think BuzzFeed would defend convicted criminals who falsely accused men of rape, putting them in prison? | ||
| Because it will make women feel like victims. | ||
| The article says at least 200 women in the UK have been prosecuted for lying about being raped in the past decade, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of press reports. | ||
| Most of these women were sent to prison, dozens of them with sentences of two years or more. | ||
| Yet the article calls them vulnerable. | ||
| I wonder why. | ||
| I've worked for these companies. | ||
| I've seen some of this stuff in action. | ||
| I've talked to people in marketing departments. | ||
| They typically believe this to be the case. | ||
| I don't think all of this is the sole reason for what we're seeing in media, but I do think that the more they produce content like this, the more they're going to produce people who are ideologically in line with these ideas. | ||
| I personally believe that media started down this track to make money. | ||
| They felt that these articles get shares, and this is what they need to do if they want to succeed. | ||
| But by doing so, they created a class of individuals who actually believe a lot of this insane rhetoric. | ||
| Ideas like the gender wage gap, which has been debunked time and time again, persists. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it'll make women angry, and they'll share the content. | ||
| Thus, young people grow up believing it to be true, then start working for these companies, and they have thus created a cycle of complete deceit. | ||
| You let me know what you think in the comments below. | ||
| We'll keep the conversation going. | ||
| Stick around. | ||
| I've got new videos every day at 4 p.m. | ||
| You can follow me on Twitter at TimCast. | ||
| And if you want to hear more ranty, short news videos, check out YouTube.com slash TimCastNews, my second channel, for videos starting at 6 p.m. | ||
| Thank you all so much for watching. |