A 2017 Burlington Post article about a missing boy has been one of InsideHalton.com's most-visited pages since December — despite a note in the headline stating the boy was found. The story from March 4, 2017 started making the rounds on Facebook in mid-December, and was the site’s most-visited news article for several weeks in a row.

Titled “UPDATE: BOY FOUND — 8-year-old Burlington boy missing, call 9-1-1 if you see him,” the story’s first line is an update stating that Cameron Rumly is no longer missing. It has generated 536,345 page views from 2018 to the time of this article, more than when it was first published in March 2017, when it generated 434,004 page views.

Its resurgence has confounded newsroom staffers, as it indicates that people are posting the story without reading its contents. Burlington social media marketer James Burchill says that is common, and often happens when people are trying to present a certain image online.

“If you look at social media, the content that ends up being carried around or shared has survival value or social capital,” he said. “Survival value is like a cautionary tale, something that makes us look smart or makes us look like we care. Social capital is the dark side of social media … It allows us to feel slightly superior, like we know something you don’t know.

“We’ll pretend we’re doing it for the right reasons, but often are doing it because it panders to something in our nature.”

He says it’s very possible that people who shared the missing boy article read the text of someone’s Facebook post without actually reading the headline. “It’s very easy to mislead people.”

Rick Hackett, a McMaster University professor and Canadian Research Chair in Organizational Behaviour and Human Performance, says that he has similar suspicions; he hasn’t studied the issue, but speculates people share news stories “to acquire a sense of ‘power,’” similar to the reason people gossip.

“They want to be seen as a valuable source of information, giving themselves a sense of importance … Moreover, they’re most likely to share information that has an emotional component (as is the case with a missing child). If they had not read the story, perhaps they felt that they were doing a service by informing others, hoping that broadened awareness could lead to finding the child.”

While it’s hard to determine who first posted the 2017 story in December, a Facebook user called “Baby Bella Boutique/Lala's Boutique” appears to be one of the first, posting the link on Dec. 19 — it continued getting traction well into February, after being reposted on several personal pages and groups dedicated to missing people.

Halton Regional Police say that the story’s popularity has not resulted in any recent calls from the public about the missing boy.