Random Facebook User’s Question Gets Four Million Votes
Facebook recently redesigned its Questions feature to be more simple and viral. It seems to be working–maybe too well. A single question by a random Facebook user accumulated four million votes in the last two weeks after it spread far beyond her friend group.
What’s funny is how this seems to have come about. A Facebook user named Heather Marie Hollingsworth posted to her Facebook friends on April 2, “Cleaning out my friends list in the next few days…Do you wanna stay?” with the options “Yes, keep me,” “Don’t Care” and “No, not really.”
As of this morning, “Yes, keep me” is winning by a landslide, with 3.98 million votes out of a total of 4.11 million.
Was this a planned viral scheme or a highly successful accidental appeal to human insecurities? It seems like the latter. Hollingsworth doesn’t currently display much information on her profile, describing herself as a 23-year-old mother of two. What seems to have happened is Facebook Questions’ viral features did their job.
Each time someone voted in Hollingsworth’s poll, a blurb about their vote got posted to their friends’ news feeds. These people seemingly assumed that one of their own Facebook friends was the one cleaning out the friends list, and (in most cases) pleaded for mercy. You can see in the screenshot below respondents addressing their comments to the different names of friends through which they found it.
It’s not like voting in Hollingsworth’s poll downloaded some nasty virus on people’s computers, but it did confuse and annoy them. Facebook might want to consider dialing back Question posts to users’ news feeds in order to constrain people from abusing them, as the company has done with third-party apps on its platform.
A Facebook spokesperson said that Hollingsworth’s wasn’t the most popular Facebook Question ever, as polls for brands like Starbucks have gotten more votes in the past. However, another harmlessly deceptive question that went viral earlier this year (before the redesign) got only 60,000 votes before being shut down by Facebook.
Research has linked low levels of vitamin D to multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease; and a major randomised controlled US study is investigating whether healthy levels of vitamin D may reduce the risk of cancer, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Colin Michie, a consultant paediatrician, analysed the cases of 17 babies and infants treated at Ealing Hospital for a severe lack of vitamin D between 2006 and 2008. He found many experienced a delay in walking, a problem last common in Victorian times. His findings renewed calls for vitamin D pills to be made more widely available on the NHS, especially for pregnant women.
Giving all pregnant women vitamin D supplements could cut the number of multiple sclerosis sufferers by up to 80 per cent, research published in February 2009 found.
Scientists have proved a long-suspected link between the "sunshine vitamin'' and the debilitating disease, a finding that could prevent people developing the condition in future generations.
Women should take up to 10 times the current recommended dose of vitamin D during pregnancy to protect against premature birth, researchers have urged.
The higher dose was found to halve their chance of suffering from one of a number of problems including having the baby before term and pre-eclampsia. In Britain, pregnant women are recommended to take10 micrograms of vitamin D daily for their baby's general development.
But a team from the University of South Carolina in the US found that those given 100 micrograms daily were half as likely to suffer one of a series of pregnancy problems as those taking 10 micrograms.
Supplements of vitamin D can help young children to ward off diabetes in later life, researchers reported in March 2008.
The chance of developing Type 1 diabetes fell by almost a third in those who received extra doses of the vitamin. The disease is caused when the body destroys cells in the pancreas, which regulate insulin. It often starts in early infancy and is on the rise across western Europe.
