Wednesday, March 27

More ‘likes’ for missing white kids, Ian’s victims: 5 Things podcast


On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: How race affects social media efforts to find missing kids

Senior data reporter Doug Caruso explains the USA TODAY investigation. Plus, how rescue efforts saved lives in Florida after Hurricane Ian, national political correspondent Phillip Bailey looks at candidates running for office who have denied 2020 election results, former President Donald Trump files an emergency Supreme Court appeal dealing with Mar-a-Lago documents and Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is back on.

Podcasts:True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here.

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Wednesday, the 5th of October, 2022. Today, social media, race and missing children. Plus the latest from Hurricane Ian recovery efforts and more.

Here are some of the top headlines.

  1. A malfunctioning South Korean ballistic missile blew up as it slammed into the ground today during a live fire drill with the United States. The drill was a response to North Korea’s successful launch of a weapon a day earlier.
  2. Aaron Judge has set a new American League record for home runs, hitting his 62nd of the season last night against the Texas Rangers. He passes fellow New York Yankee legend Roger Maris for the record.
  3. And NFL star Tom Brady and supermodel Gisele Bundchen have hired divorce attorneys, according to Page Six. The pair married in 2009 and share two children.

Social media could be an equalizer when it comes to finding missing children. It can highlight posts about kids from all backgrounds without the filters of traditional media and police gatekeepers. But a USA TODAY analysis suggests that social media audiences still pick favorites by giving more likes, shares, and views on posts about missing white children, especially girls, than missing Black children. Producer PJ Elliott spoke with investigative reporter Doug Caruso to find out more.

Doug Caruso:

We looked at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Facebook video posts over about a three-year period, and what we found was, one, that the Center posts more about Black children than it does about other races of children. And part of the reason we believe that happens is because they say they are looking to help people who haven’t been featured in the media or featured in police, and we know from research that Black missing children often are ignored by the police or the media. So that was encouraging to see that they’re trying to kind of overcome that bias. But then when we looked at what audiences do with those posts, we found that the audiences are still much more interested in viewing the videos that are about white missing children, and especially white missing girls, than they are about Black missing children. I think it was roughly 63,000 average views on a video post about a white girl compared to about 38,000 average views on posts about Black girls.

PJ Elliott:

Doug, can you talk a little bit about how this investigation came about?

Doug Caruso:

There’s a researcher in Louisiana named Michelle Jeanis, and she had tested this with a Facebook page for a smaller group, not with just children, but with both missing adults and missing children, and had seen this effect where people of color were getting far fewer clicks, likes, interactions than white people. And so we thought, well, let’s take a look at that nationally. We went to the biggest missing children clearing house in the country, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, we pulled down data about their Facebook posts from CrowdTangle, then we went through each of those posts and determined what the race, age, gender of the child was, and then did our analysis from there.

Also Read  Facebook failed to detect misinformation on Brazil election, group warns

PJ Elliott:

So, how can these posts about the missing people of color reach more people?

Doug Caruso:

One thing that Michelle Jeanis tested was boosting the posts, what she found in a second study that she did this year that she shared with us, she was boosting any missing person post in her test cases. They were boosting it in the state where the person went missing and in every state nearby. And by doing that, she found that people of color’s posts would go up to more or less parity with a white woman’s post. And then she found if she tried to boost a white woman’s post, it almost had no effect because they were already getting sort of a maximum saturation out there. So her suggestion was to boost the post. When we talked with the National Center, they said that they do boost posts frequently, but that they tend to boost their posts within a 25 mile radius of where the missing person is gone. And they may be boosting just about everything that goes out, but we were seeing definite differences in viewership despite that lesser boost that they’re doing.

Taylor Wilson:

You can read the full investigation with a link in today’s episode description.

We’re learning more about the victims of Hurricane Ian, one of the strongest storms to ever hit the US mainland. The death toll has now passed a hundred, with those killed ranging from age 22 to 96, and Florida medical examiners are revealing grim details of just how some of the victims died. A warning, the following is graphic.


www.usatoday.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *