{"id":224,"date":"2026-01-27T19:45:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T19:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/?p=224"},"modified":"2026-01-29T15:15:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T15:15:16","slug":"something-bad-happened-in-the-world-many-people-died-do-you-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/2026\/01\/27\/something-bad-happened-in-the-world-many-people-died-do-you-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Something bad happened in the world. Many people died. Do you care?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few years ago, in a paper called “Out of sight, not out of mind<\/a>“, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My data on people\u2019s interest comes from Google Trends, where I extracted the search volume for \u201cGaza war\u201d and for \u201cIranian protests\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, here\u2019s the search volume (normalized separately) for the first 30 days of each event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Normalized search volume as a function of the time from the start of the event<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The search volume for Gaza starts high, probably due to the October 7th<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this figure is misleading, because it shows normalized data. Here\u2019s the data, unnormalized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Comparison of search volume for the Gaza war and the Iranian protests<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That blip on the right-hand side is the interest in the Iran protests. At the maximum it\u2019s only 8% that of the Gaza war (!). The average over the first 4 weeks of each event is even worse, at 6%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, here\u2019s the correlation between Google Trends search volume per country and the physical and social distance from the events:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/td>Physical distance<\/td>Social distance<\/td><\/tr>
Iran protests<\/td>0.04<\/td>0.43<\/td><\/tr>
Gaza war<\/td>0.10<\/td>0.19<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table>
Spearman correlation between search volume and physical or social distance. If no search volume was given, it was assumed to be zero. Social distance correlation was computed for countries where search volume was non-zeros or the number of people in the diaspora was non-zero. Only social distance in the Iran protests is statistically significant (P<0.05 with Bonferroni correction).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My takeaway from all this data is that Iranians haven\u2019t caught the world\u2019s attention. Many of the people interested in their protests are their friends and relatives who live abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it\u2019s 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 \u201cother\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(A case in point: Remember when the UN was up in arms when the internet in Gaza disconnected for a few hours? Strangely, it\u2019s been 2 weeks since it\u2019s gone down in Iran, but the UN hasn\u2019t protested that).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One could also mention antisemitism, but that\u2019s something I already wrote about<\/a> in the past, so I won’t mention it again (though it probably has an effect).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s examine … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Something bad happened in the world. Many people died. Do you care?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}