How to Make a Photo Go Viral

A woman in cyberpunk body paint stands in the center of a ring of old laptops. It's a staged photo about e-waste, sure, but photographer Ben Von Wong hasn't just set up the photo to look cool. He wants it to go viral: "I create viral campaigns around boring topics," he said. Radio Motherboard spoke to Von Wong about the campaign, and about everything that goes into making sure people actually consume his content: "I gathered almost 1,000 people on an email newsletter who said within the first 24 hours of launch, 'I promise to like, comment, and share it in order to fuck with Facebook's algorithm.' Literally manufacturing popularity in content by making sure these people would see the content within the first certain amount of time that it launches to artificially make it more popular."

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