A few years ago, in a paper called “Out of sight, not out of mind“, we showed that people’s attention to an event somewhere in the world decays exponentially as a function of their physical distance from it, but people also care if they are close to an event though their social contacts.
Let’s examine two events that happened in recent years and see if those metrics still matter. The two events are the war in Gaza and the demonstrations in Iran. Tens of thousands of people died in both (the exact numbers are disputed or not well known), so they are somewhat similar in scope.
My data on people’s interest comes from Google Trends, where I extracted the search volume for “Gaza war” and for “Iranian protests” per country. I augmented these data with the size of the diaspora of Palestine and Iran in different countries and the physical distance from each country. The number of people originally from Palestine or Iran in each country will represent our social distance, under the assumption that if many people from, say, Iran live in Canada, there would be more interest in those events in Canada.
First, here’s the search volume (normalized separately) for the first 30 days of each event.
The search volume for Gaza starts high, probably due to the October 7th attack by Hamas. Interestingly, it takes a long time to decay. This is not normal behavior: The Iran protests are much more typical, where interest in a news event usually decays within 3-4 days. Here the unusual thing is that it started 10 days after the beginning of the protests.
However, this figure is misleading, because it shows normalized data. Here’s the data, unnormalized.
That blip on the right-hand side is the interest in the Iran protests. At the maximum it’s only 8% that of the Gaza war (!).
Now, here’s the correlation between Google Trends search volume per country and the physical and social distance from the events:
| Physical distance | Social distance | |
| Iran protests | 0.04 | 0.04 |
| Gaza war | 0.10 | 0.18 |
The Gaza war is uncorrelated with either physical or social distance. In the case of Iran, only social distance is somewhat correlated (but statistically significant).
My takeaway from all this data is that Iranians haven’t caught the world’s attention. Many of the people interested in their protests are their friends and relatives who live abroad.
I think it’s a combination of the Iranian government shutting down the internet, making it hard for media organizations to get footage from the protests, but also many organizations and governments treating Iranians as the “other”, who are beyond the pale. It’s a similar case to that which the Kurds and Druze (in Syria), the Yazidis in Iraq and other minorities in the middle east found themselves in over the past few years.
(A case in point: Remember when the UN was up in arms when the internet in Gaza disconnected for a few hours? Strangely, it’s been 2 weeks since it’s gone down in Iran, but the UN hasn’t protested that).
One could also mention antisemitism, but that’s something I already wrote about in the past, so I won’t mention it again (though it probably has an effect).