Newswhip

This photo of Kim Stafford had 10,000 notes in 24 hours on Tumblr before she even knew it was on the Internet.

It's September 2012 and Kim Stafford has just been invited to her first real college party -- a big, noisy, standard-issue college kegger at the frat up the street.

"It's Boston Tea Party themed. I found out at the last minute."

She's scrambling, wondering where to get colonial garb late on a Saturday night. Then it hits her: "Why don't I dress up like one of those Tea Baggers?"

So she and her roommate open up her laptop and scroll through a few pages of misspelled signs from Tea Party rallies. They find a keeper: "A Village in Kenia is Missing There Idiot." It may have been even more misspelled than that, she thinks. She remembers having to tone it down.

Still, it's perfect for tonight. Wrong enough to know this couldn't be on purpose, right enough to be seem temporarily sincere, at first glance. Most importantly, it's right enough to start a conversation at a college party.

Kim finds an old pizza box propped up in her dorm room and scrawls the sentence onto its base. She'll wear it like a sandwich board and call it a costume.

"I tied some friendship bracelet string around it and I was good to go."

Her roommate took a picture of it before they set off and tossed it up on Facebook.

Sometime that night, a friend of Kim's roommate took the picture and posted it on Tumblr without a caption. From there it took on a life of its own.

Facebook announced this month it'll be changing its algorithm. Memes like image macros and screenshots of email chain letters will show up less. "High quality articles about current events" will appear more. You may have already noticed the changes.

"Meme photos may show up a bit less prominently," Facebook wrote in a statement on December 2nd. "Starting soon, we'll be doing a better job of distinguishing between a high quality article on a website versus a meme photo hosted somewhere other than Facebook."

It's similar to Google's "Panda" update from February of 2011. The search giant had been inundated with content farms who had been creating content solely based on high-return search terms. Sites like Examiner.com and AssociatedContent repeatedly stacked the top of most common search terms with hastily written summaries instead of quality content.

Three years later, Google is bigger than ever.

But some in the tech community are skeptical of Facebook's endgame. Detractors argue that, while well-intentioned, the changes could take the democratization out of the largest social network on the Web.

"Regardless of whether you agree, that sounds an awful lot like Facebook knows what's best for us and we're going to get a dose of that – like it or not," writes Molly McHugh at DigitalTrends.com.

Or as journalism non-profit Poynter put it this week: "Is Facebook's latest Newsfeed algorithm really intended to save us from ourselves?"

Around 24 hours later, Kim got a message from a friend she hadn't talked to in three years.

"There's a picture of you going around Tumblr," it said.

"I was like, 'Oh, what embarrassing selfie is going around Tumblr?'"

It was the "Kenia" picture. It already had 2,000 notes on it. A few had already called her an idiot and a whore.

"I thought, 'Oh shit,'" she says. "It was immediate."

Without context, people on Tumblr thought the picture -- the misspellings, the goofy face, the Birther tendencies two months before a heated election -- were sincere.

She started looking for ways to stem this. There was no automatic solution. She had emailed Tumblr and Facebook, but they had given their rote responses: It was out there now. There was nothing they could do.

It was in the tens of thousands of notes now and growing.

Then the inevitable death threats came. "Goddamn, that horse is ugly," one post said. Now a few separate posts with thousands of notes on them. Over 1,100 upvotes on Reddit. "A shitty meat sack." "Slut." "I bet this girl got turned into a Chinese finger trap after this by two black guys." A meme generator site added this below her face: "Kenya. Their. Kill yourself." That's how it got onto Pinterest. Over 530 Pins on that first meme alone.

She had to fix this manually, she decided. "Dumb bitch," in some variation, had been the most common caption. Kim got a Tumblr account and named it datdumbitch.tumblr.com. She would end this post-by-post, one-by-one.

"I reblogged the same picture of myself over and over again and told them who I was and that it was all just a joke. I did it as nicely as I could," she says. "I did it at least 100 times, maybe."

Really, she did it over 360 times.

Then The Daily What posted it a few days before the election. This seemed to give it some credibility. It then made its way to Facebook.

"The worst part about it was Facebook," she says.

"It got on this Being Liberal Facebook page. Thousands of shares, thousands of comments, thousands of likes. Some of the worst things were said there," Stafford says. "And they wouldn't take it down."

She says they wouldn't remove it until she proved it was her. She sent them a bunch of pictures. She had just gotten a haircut.

"They said, 'We can't tell that it's you. Because it doesn't look like you."

More comments. More shares. More people hurling insults at her mom and dad on Facebook. They eventually put a caption up that said this was a person playing a joke. Then they blocked all of Kim's friends that came to her defense on the group.

"I was glued to the computer. I was actually glued. I would not leave my computer because I was just reblogging this picture over and over again for my entire first month of college," says Stafford.

"Needless to say, I have not been invited to an actual college party since," says Stafford. The photo was first posted 15 months ago. "They all know what happened. Nobody wants to get involved."

In a post titled "I think I give up," on October 6th, 2012, she wrote this:

"I just wanted to restore my honor and make friends, but people are evil."

Facebook is in for an influx of good PR if this works. Horror stories like Stafford's will be possible, but harder to achieve. But it's not just outright benevolence. There's a business reason behind it.

"There may be a PR benefit, but they're doing it for monetization or engagement," says Greg Pritchard.

Pritchard is the VP of Publisher Services at GumGum. He helps big publishers place contextual video ads and images on places like Facebook for a living. He thinks, in part, it could make advertisers a lot happier.

"It's a more contextually relevant environment," says Pritchard. "If I'm Ford or GM or Audi and my messaging is appearing between photos of someone's baby and a cat video, it's not as contextually relevant as it is next to something from, say, a car magazine or new information."

Pritchard also thinks the flood of quality stories coming directly from Facebook friends has slowed with the arrival of more specific social networks with more engaged audiences. That once-in-a-lifetime picture is more likely to wind up on Instagram, that one-liner about the football game probably belongs on Twitter, and that video of your brand new puppy might fit better on Vine.

Social media metrics site newswhip collected data about sites with the highest Facebook traffic before the algorithm changes. Meme sites Buzzfeed, Upworthy and the Blaze hover near the top, alongside or higher than news sites like the Huffington Post or CNN.

"The problem that Facebook has is that if people stop posting as much, then there's less content being created, and that's how you get a stale experience," says Pritchard. "A place like Wired is going to post new content every day regardless, even if the individual people aren't anymore."

Therein lies the true crux of the issue: The Internet savvy are, in fact, posting on other platforms. Facebook even admitted as such in a press release earlier this year:

"For example, we believe that some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram."

Youth are fleeing Facebook. Facebook, however, is still growing at astronomical rates. That growth stems from very late adopters. The novelty of commenting and anonymity hasn't worn off yet. The sense of scale and the lack of privacy has not yet set in.

So Pritchard thinks, overall, the changes are a good thing for everybody -- even if it temporarily means you'll be going to Facebook a little bit less.

"I think we all know it's never been a democratic process about how they decide what's surfaced into the feed," says Pritchard. "The computers know better what's good for us than we do."

Still, are we using this technology correctly? Is the same tool that rendered the newspaper and the encyclopedia obsolete best used boiled down to its most basic form -- context-free images that either drum up outrage or hit any other quick-trigger emotional button? Do we need large-scale Internet education? If we do, how do we reach those who are past the age of traditional, mandated schooling?

Or is this just the way it is now?

"I see what (Facebook is) trying to do. I think, maybe, they're trying to move Facebook in more of a prestigious direction. But I don't go to Facebook to read scholarly articles," says Stafford. "That's not the point of Facebook."

It's been over a year since the photo was first posted. Every once in a while, the picture pops up again in Kim's life.

The most prevalent rumor had her going to the University of Alabama. She doesn't. She goes to a liberal arts school in Massachusetts. A reporter from Alabama tracked her down and found her blog anyway. He wrote a story telling people she had never been to Alabama and she wasn't serious in the photo.

"Even in the comments of the article that he wrote, people were saying really awful, hateful things," she says. "A lot of people just skipped right over the story. Or once they got caught, they were embarrassed and didn't want to feel stupid."

Stafford has a sense of humor about it now.

She remembers the funniest moment of the whole thing, the strangest threat of all of them. It said this: "Whoever you are, you're a stupid bitch, and if I ever run into you, I'm going to make you eat buffalo dick."

"I'm thinking, 'I hope I do (run into you),'" she says. "I'd want to ask him a couple of questions. I'm wondering why he has a buffalo dick."

Life's better now a year later. She still hasn't been invited to a college party, but she has a boyfriend now. She has friends she loves. She likes school. She's studying psychology.

"I'd actually wanted to be a therapist way before this," she says. "It's funny. I really care what people think about me. I genuinely enjoy human interaction. To think, for a while, that's what people thought about me -- that was really hard. It was a revelation for me."

As for the Facebook changes, Kim's in favor of them, but she doesn't think it'll change the hate-first, facts-later ways of the new Web.

"I think this whole story says a lot about human nature. There's not much you can do about it on the Internet. It's just that people suck. It's that people enjoy it. They enjoyed saying those things. And the truth is, if you ask them, people don't like to think of themselves as someone who's enjoying that," says Stafford. "I wish that were true."

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