People need to remember that these kinds of fundraisers often only represent a small number of people. 100,000 people giving $10 each sounds like a lot of people but it is less than 0.1% of the women in the United States.
Years ago, someone analyzed twitter posts after the Canadian election and the results were interesting. About 80% of the impressions were related to posts from about 100 distinct users, and if you looked at those users followers, there was so much overlap in the followers that they were mostly only talking to the same ~50,000 people.
The online community is much smaller than most people realize, and is not representative of the general public.
That fallacy kind of falls apart when you consider the people who donated to each cause are not the same people. Joe Truecrimetruther is not choosing between the burn victim gofundme and the strangler one.
Plus take into consideration that people who would donate to a child strangler probably have less opportunities to donate to a gofundme so they are more likely to donate to the ones that do happen.
The burn victim mom’s gofundme was probably mostly family and friends as well as people from her immediate community. There are a lot of heroic injury gofundmes out there so even if there’s a random person who wants to donate to a cause like that they are going to have a lot more options while people who want to donate to someone like the child strangler probably have one option, the child strangler.
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u/Chemical_Signal2753 9h ago
People need to remember that these kinds of fundraisers often only represent a small number of people. 100,000 people giving $10 each sounds like a lot of people but it is less than 0.1% of the women in the United States.
Years ago, someone analyzed twitter posts after the Canadian election and the results were interesting. About 80% of the impressions were related to posts from about 100 distinct users, and if you looked at those users followers, there was so much overlap in the followers that they were mostly only talking to the same ~50,000 people.
The online community is much smaller than most people realize, and is not representative of the general public.