This paper advocates a conceptual paradigm we call influence literacy to explain how information with a high emotional charge seems to dominate social media flows. It can be especially useful for understanding dynamics like the spread of viral rumours online, such as the recent emergence of the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy from a single tweet.

In conversations about health misinformation, it is common to hear about the importance of information literacy: critical thinking about where information can be found, and the authority of sources. Conversations also reference media literacy, which tends to conceptualise information in terms of specific messages that are crafted by specific messengers, delivered over specific media formats, and received by specific media audiences—some intended, others not.

Useful as these are, neither of these helps explain two online realities every young person today intuitively understands. First, on social media platforms, some voices will always wind up amplified over others. Second, for every individual or organisation who manages to “game the platform” to promote ideas, there is another who is “gamed,” finding themselves abused online in ways that are worsened by algorithmic amplification.

Enter influence literacy. Combining insights of data literacy and persuasive computing, influence literacy’s first mission is a critical understanding of how platforms value users less as audience, than as producers of messages, responses, and data. The second objective involves an appreciation of how metrics of popularity (likes, followers, ratings, personal reputation) and censure (negative commentary, harassment, weaponization) morph into bodily experiences like esteem, shame, risk, and reward.

Our paper includes a map called the Influence Ecosphere, which explains platform relationships between social media actors; automated events; psychological states; interface triggering; emotional drivers (including algorithmic tracking and platform control); and social discourses (about social media at large, and about specific social media practices.)