What it's like to go horribly, horribly viral

I incurred the wrath of a continent (and the Daily Mail)

Daily Mail

Tony Hsieh, the former chief executive of Zappos and fabled internet entrepreneur, was known for his killer job interview questions. One in particular struck a chord with me. Hsieh would ask candidates to name the biggest misperception that others had about them.

After they answered, he would follow up with: “What’s the difference between perception and misperception?” I’m not sure I have a good response to this question, even with plentiful notice. What would yours be? And what does our difficulty in answering say about our ability to perceive ourselves in relation to others?

A little over two years ago, I wrote a column for the Evening Standard that went viral. If the Iraq War is nailed on for the second line of Tony Blair’s obituary, mine is an article about, of all things, a holiday to Sydney. Read it for yourself, if you wish, but essentially, it was a short missive about how Australia is just too nice to live in, what with its stunning beaches and kind-hearted people, and how I was relieved to be returning home to the grim UK.

I thought the irony was self-evident and that my self-deprecation would be endearing. For example, I cursed my luck at how, looks-wise, I was a “solid seven” in London but, on arrival in Sydney, was instantly “demoted to a five, five-and-a-half on a good hair day”. To paraphrase Emperor Hirohito, these words developed not necessarily to my advantage.

The Standard’s Facebook page

At the time, I wrote a fortnightly column for the paper, and gave this one no more or less thought than any of the scores of others I had churned out. Written late on a Thursday evening, probably in my pyjamas and almost certainly on the sofa, I sent it off to various editors and sub-editors, and promptly went to sleep.

The first pang of discomfort struck when I read the headline on the Friday. Now, as per Hugo Rifkind’s Twitter profile, columnists do not write their own headlines. In the case of my article, it was crafted by the Standard’s comment editor, whose job it is to commission, edit and write headlines that will entice people to click and read. He certainly achieved his aims that day. I mean:

The online headline in the Standard

It wasn’t until the weekend that I realised something was amiss. I don’t mean the hundreds of disobliging comments on the Standard’s Facebook page. I was used to that, having written about politics for a while, including one piece where I not-entirely-seriously suggested the Treasury should tax people who refused to get vaccinated for Covid-19. Instead, it was when someone sent me a screenshot over the weekend from the Daily Mail, replete with my face, seven out of 10 or otherwise. Brace yourself for the SEO-friendly headline:

Daily Mail headline

It turns out that, far from praising Australia, I had ‘slammed’ it. There was something of a compliment in this. The Mail had picked up the story because of the traffic being generated, and it wanted its slice. But things had only just got going. The story was swiftly run by Channel 7, News Corp’s news.com.au and LADbible, amongst others. They all concluded I was, in fact, not good looking, which is odd, because my mother often calls me ‘handsome’.

Soon, I received invitations from British and Australian radio shows to, as one producer menacingly framed it, “defend myself”. Meanwhile, my colleagues were receiving messages from friends all over the world asking, “Do you know this Jack person?”

Next, I got yelled at on Twitter by Nick Bateman, also known as ‘Nasty Nick’ from the first series of Big Brother. Surely, I thought, this represented some sort of narrative end point? Not quite.

Before long, one throwaway comment – that after a while, “it began to feel weird living in a country that did not have an independent nuclear deterrent” – sparked a serious discussion on LinkedIn amongst the Australian security think tank community about whether the country should indeed pursue its own unconventional defence capabilities.

Weeks later, my column was still regularly appearing as the top-read on the Standard’s website, which receives more than a million views a day. Yet I still don’t think I had fully registered what was happening. It took a comment from a senior colleague, not necessarily the cuddliest of types, who informed me that the paper “had a duty of care” to me. I initially assumed they were joking, but the concerned look on their face suggested otherwise.

I am, of course, not the first person to whom this sort of thing has happened. Take this article by an NYU student for Business Insider, about how she hated her semester abroad in Florence. Cue the backlash. This variety of opinion piece is the fault not of the young writer, who I’m sure was keen for the commission, but of the editors, hungry for hate clicks. I was fortunate, in that I was older, with a solid back catalogue of more substantive writing behind me.

Like any decent column, we ought to finish where we began, on perception. Journalists want nothing more than for their articles to be read by as wide an audience as possible. But there is a tradeoff. The wider the audience, the greater the chance of misunderstandings. Those who knew me well and read the piece would instantly recognise the humour. People who knew me only a little well might be able to guess. Meanwhile, total strangers (many of whom read no further than a screenshot of the headline) would have none of that context, and why would they?

So, perhaps I can now answer Hsieh’s question. What’s the difference between perception and misperception? About several million page views and a potentially tricky conversation with my (thankfully very understanding) Australian in-laws.

Have a lovely weekend. Mentally, I’ll be hiding out here in case this blows up again.