Anatomy of a Traffic Spike (News Quiz Edition)
Welcome back to our semi-regular “Anatomy of a Traffic Spike” feature. For the uninitiated, we like to examine and share instances where current events cause something to trend on our pages for unforeseen (and usually unforeseeable reasons). We use these occasions to study how people interact with the law in general and our website in particular. And these moments confirm the importance of our commitment to aiding public discourse by making primary source materials easily available to the public.
This time, we look to the U.S. Code and specifically to 18 USC 2071. Let’s see if you can guess what it addresses from only the following clues:
- In the 12 months prior to February of 2020, the most pageviews in a single day that code section had ever received on our website was 103.
- Only 5 times in that same 12 month period had there been more than 50 pageviews in a single day.
- In fact, the page had been viewed only 7,314 times during that 12-month span.
- On Tuesday, February 4th, however, a record 315 people viewed the page a total of 367 times. Almost all of these pageviews occurred after 10:00pm Eastern Standard Time.
(This is your first big hint.)
- The very next day the page saw 207,657 visits. It helped make February 5, 2020 our busiest single day in terms of total sessions since Google Analytics came on the scene many years ago to help us track such things. (Legend has it that since we were the only place to have Bush v. Gore online when it was handed down on December 12, 2000, the site averaged more than 5000 hits per minute for 14 hours.)
- Traffic continued to come to that page at a steady clip. Almost 100,000 people viewed it the next day, and more than 25,000 the day after that. (Remember, this is a page that had only hit triple digits once in the previous year.) Even as we write this, traffic to that page still hasn’t returned to normal. February 17–almost two weeks after the “event”–saw more than enough hits to triple the previous “record” of 103 pageviews.
- We couldn’t find a single contemporaneous news report linking to 18 USC 2071 on our site. Over 99% of its traffic has come from search engines (like Google or Bing) and links in social media posts (such as Facebook and Twitter).
(This would be your second big hint if you looked at this stuff the way we do!)
Okay, so far that’s all pretty vague for those of you trying to guess. Here is some important context you’ll find helpful:
- Prominent fact-checking websites felt the need to address the specific event that gave rise to this spike: and,
- The 2020 State of the Union address began at 9:00pm EST on February 4th and ran for about an hour and eighteen minutes. (see first big hint above)
Got it yet? Well, here’s a hyperlink: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071
If you’re still not clear on exactly what folks were looking up online, check out the aforementioned fact-checking articles on PolitiFact and Snopes here!
