10,000 friends liked this? Must be true!
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/erhardt/learning-from-political-experiments-and-information-cascades-on-facebook
“Don’t follow the crowd; be yourself; don’t give into peer pressure!” These are phrases we’ve all grown up with; they are phrases that my mom has drilled into me ever since I could walk to school with my little group of neighborhood elementary school friends. Yet they are such prevalent phrases that most of the time, they are overlooked. The forces of people around you especially in the midst of the technology revolution plays in one of the most tremendous influences in decision-making, trends, and even predicting political campaigns. In class, we called this the “information cascade”. But a crucial property of these cascades is that they are extremely fragile, and can be overturned by a small amount of additional info. This actually directly affects our everyday lives much more than recognized.
According to a wide-spread study conducted using Facebook data, a data scientist actually working for Facebook discovered that the information cascade using social media can spark social movement, shape information, and even affect political engagement. Information is shared easily through social media platforms, which in turn is spread even easier by the “likes”, “comments”, and “re-share” options. The deeper the friendships are between people, the larger the network of people seeing it becomes. We can thus predict both the presence and shape of large cascades by looking at the factors that determine if a post will take off. These factors include veracity, content, origins, and temporal patterns, where we can even predict shape by observing the trend it is going at currently. The “veracity” factor of the post leads us to rumors. Posts that spread rapidly become even more rapid when they are rumors, with more and more people becoming inquisitive of the truthfulness of the post, thereby liking, re-sharing, and showing their friends. The most interesting observation of this study is that these cascades can even affect political campaigns. For example, in the 2012 campaign, users reported that they were more interested in politics or government, when unaware of the connection, they saw more news of the election on their news feed. Thus, since they reported this, there was an increase in number of voters, due to the people that convinced themselves they were interested because of the frequency of posts they have seen. However, the unstableness of cascades is an important note. Because the movement of a cascade is so strictly dependent on the information or implied information known, if any additional info is given, a cascade could easily be overturned. For example, going back to the rumor post, according to this study, if a humorous counter-post was made that suggested more truthfulness, it would in turn spread even more rapidly than the original post did, thereby changing users’ mindsets and completely inverting original beliefs.