What happens when Barack Obama shares a link on Facebook?

A case study of Obama’s editorial influence on social media

On Tuesday morning (9:10am EDT), Sigal Samuel published a story to Vox about new habits people have developed as a result of quarantine, presenting responses from over 100 people across the globe.

Based on the CrowdTangle Chrome plugin, Vox shared the story on their Facebook page shortly thereafter (9:11am EDT, to be exact). While Vox has over 2.5 million followers on Facebook, this article did not get very far: only 829 people interacted with it. They tried again at 4:41pm EDT, and received even less engagement — 219 interactions.

As of 11:00am Wednesday morning, only five other sources had shared the story on Facebook, and it had received just over 1,000 interactions. Then, Barack Obama shared it, and its interactions increased a hundredfold.

As of today, the article sits atop Vox’s “Most Read” list, and Obama’s Facebook post has 116,330 interactions.