Monday 20 November 2023 · moved the Index · spike
Red Sea attacks begin
Houthi forces seized the car carrier Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea on November 19, 2023, boarding the vessel by helicopter and diverting it to Yemen with its crew held on board. Footage of the boarding released by the Houthis drew wide international coverage and condemnation. The seizure marked the start of the sustained Houthi campaign against commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
Peak 122.0 on Monday 20 November 2023. The shaded band is the incident window.
Where the attention came from
Over the whole window this ran Mixed; on the peak day itself it read Social-led. When the two differ, the fast signals (social, news) spiked and faded while the slow ones (search, research) carried the tail. Mixed means no single signal dominated — the attention was spread across search, research, news and social. Social here is X alone — Bluesky only joins the series from July 2024 — so its level isn't directly comparable with today's series, though its share of this incident is real.
Bar = share of the extra attention over the whole window; the tick marks the share on the peak day alone, where the two differ.
How unusual it was
The #10 incident since 2020 by peak. Its peak day ranks #198 among all days — the higher days all belong to 10 bigger incidents.
How far it spread
No vessel type moved — 0 of 6 vessel-type groups drew clearly more readers than usual.
The car-carrier multiple here is a measurement artefact: the underlying Wikipedia article carried a sustained surge of automated, non-human traffic from April 2023 that vanished overnight on 1 June 2024, so its lifts in that period do not reflect reader interest.
Readers here means readers of the Wikipedia article on each vessel type — the same source as the Research signal, not news coverage — so an incident can dominate the news without moving this panel. Bars start at 1× — normal readership for that vessel type, the weeks before the incident. Grey = no clear lift. "Over time" shows each group's daily readers through the window; "All 12 articles" breaks the six groups back into their members.
How it was framed the frame glossary →
Lead frame: geopolitical pawn. Trade press was 3% of in-scope coverage — the story had left the trade press and gone mainstream. (Historical coverage is scored on headlines only.)
Acting, or acted upon
In 70% of coverage shipping was the thing acted upon rather than the actor.
How the coverage sounded
Coverage ran 68% negative overall; 28% strongly so.
Each article is scored on a five-step scale from strongly negative to strongly positive; the bar is the share of coverage at each step.
Maritime Attention Index, incident: Red Sea attacks begin, peak 122.0 on 20 November 2023. maritimeattentionindex.com/incidents/2023-red-sea-attacks-begin/