Paris Attacks and Facebook’s Information Cascades
With the tragic terrorist attacks that just occurred in Paris, it seems unlikely that information cascades on Facebook play any role. However, the two are intimately connected and help explain social media trends as a whole. After news of the devastation wreaked on Paris, the international community, namely leaders of countries and the UN, expressed sorrow and their utmost support. On a more micro scale, however, average citizens felt the need to display their support as well. Sensing the growing concern in the international community and seeing an opportunity to promote a new feature, Facebook released its profile picture update that allows users to superimpose the French flag (show above) on their normal profile picture.
The release of this feature started a massive information cascade based on two reasons indicated on the previous course homework: information-based reasons and direct-benefit reasons. At first, Facebook users most closely following the Paris attacks wanting to contribute jumped at the opportunity to update their profile picture with the additional feature. After several people update their profile, Facebook shares the updates prompting those users’ friends to also change their profile pictures. Thus an information cascade begins in which the decision of the first few to change their profile picture dictates the behavior of subsequent people to also change their profile picture to follow the trend rather than making the decision based on their own private beliefs. Similarly, direct-benefit cascades were formed by users updating their pictures because several close friends decided to update their own. In this way, updating one’s profile picture becomes inherently more valuable and a cascade forms.
Clearly, Facebook has noble intentions with its French flag profile picture, but there are deeper implications to the update. Facebook can use the data created from users who update their profile picture with the flag to better understand how its users respond to Facebook’s updates and how their actions propagate throughout their friends in the form of information cascades. As noble as Facebook may seem, all of its updates are to better understand its users and improve the social media site’s role in distributing a variety of information. These reasons ultimately boil down to Facebook’s primary role as a corporation to generate revenue and bring value to its stockholders. Therefore, even the seemingly noble actions of creating a sympathetic update to honor the Paris attacks is in reality driven by big data and information cascades that help Facebook track and understand its users for future update releases.