Videos that Play with Numbers, Dangerously

Topping the week's Viral Video Chart is the trailer for a new book on social media marketing, arguing that social media is not a fad. It closely mirrors XPLANE's viral hit, also about the importance of new technology. Say what you will about social media, but this sort of video, combining surprising statistics with flashy graphics and electronic music, is emerging as a fad in its own right on YouTube.

The video is rife with the arm-waving hyperbole and confusion of trends favoured by so-called social media experts -- at one point, it seems to define books on the Kindle as a kind of social media -- but it does grab your attention. That is the strength of stats videos -- while most of us would never read a list of unconnected facts about social media, a video can keep our attention with some bright colours and catchy tunes. There is something authoritative about statistics rendered in slick animation. But YouTube is actually a terrible vehicle for stats, because it does away with the web's greatest strength: easy, plentiful links to sources, survey methodology, and study sponsors.

Reworking the figures

One stat from the XPLANE video that has been widely repeated is that 80 per cent of companies are "using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees." But as a YouTube commenter pete4765 points out, the original source actually makes a weaker claim, that 80 per cent of companies use or plan to use social networking to "find and attract" job candidates this year, and that LinkedIn use among respondents increased from 80 to 95 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

There's no implication that LinkedIn is respondents' main recruitment tool. The survey in question was also run by Jobvite, "a provider of next-generation recruitment solutions," and a third of respondents were technology firms. The video has now been revised to call LinkedIn "a primary tool" not "their primary tool" but even that seems like an overstatement, and the original phrasing is still spreading on Twitter.

This video has a companion blog post, which includes a list of sources from which you can deduce everything above. But since the blog post isn't linked from the video on YouTube, most viewers will never look that far.

Miscalculating Muslims

Creators with less integrity can exploit this sort of apathy. Take Muslim Demographics, an ugly piece of xenophobic propaganda that has been viewed 10 million times since the end of March. The video claims, using illustrated statistics, that due to migration and differing birth rates, "in a matter of years, Europe as we know it will cease to exist." A BBC radio show about statistics thoroughly debunked the anonymous clip, but their fantastic and thorough response video has less than 12,000 views, so presumably many people have been mislead by the original clip.

We can take a few things from this. The first is that bloggers need to start fact-checking viral video as aggressively as they do the mainstream media. But it isn't all up to them -- next time you hit play, remember not to switch off your brain.