„We’re not equipped to deal with disasters on the scale of the Syrian war.“
To track how that played out before and after Kurdi’s death, Slovic and his team first turned to Google Trends, basically a database of keywords Google users searched for. As you’d expect, searches for “Syria,” “refugees,” and “Aylan” peaked in early September. Before that, there were no searches for “Aylan,” and search intensities for “Syria” and “refugees” had hovered around one-tenth their September peak.
But by the end of September, searches for “Syria” and “refugees” had fallen substantially, and there were hardly any searches for “Aylan” at all, Slovic and his colleagues note.