Spirals of silence in social media
http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence/
A recent survey conducted by Rutgers researchers and Pew Research Centre researchers found that people are more likely to share their political views in situations where the majority of people around them share the same views. More specifically, the survey addressed how likely people were to discuss the Snowden leaks. The reason that the Snowden leaks were chosen as an example political topic was that about half of people support Snowden’s actions and about half don’t support Snowden’s actions. The survey found that people were more likely to share their opinions on the Snowden leaks if other people initially express the same opinion. This applied in both personal conversations and in social media. So for instance people were more likely to post about the Snowden leaks on Twitter if they felt that their followers would agree with them, and they were more likely to join in a workplace conversation about the Snowden leaks if the people having the conversation shared their viewpoint. If people did not know whether those around them shared their viewpoint, they would be less likely to share their own viewpoint. The authors referred to this as a ‘spiral of silence.’
This spiral of silence can be interpreted as an information cascade. Let’s assume that initially a group of people is silent about a political issue such as the Snowden leaks and that one by one people decide to either enter the conversation or not enter the conversation. By assumption, the first person will then share their viewpoint A on the issue. If the second person has the opposite viewpoint B, then they will choose not to share their viewpoint because Bayesian probability would suggest that the majority of people do not share that viewpoint B. The third person would then be able to infer that the second person has a viewpoint B because they did not speak up. So the third person would assume that there is a 50% chance that the majority of people share his or her viewpoint and a 50% chance that they don’t. Since by assumption people will only speak up when they believe a definite majority of people agrees with them, person three will not speak up. All subsequent people will have the same information as person three – that person one has viewpoint A and person two has viewpoint B – so no one from that point on will share their viewpoint and a spiral of silence information cascade will occur. However if person two has a viewpoint A, then they will choose to also share their viewpoint. In this case, person three’s choice to speak up or not will communicate definite information to the rest of the group: speaking up will communicate that they have a viewpoint A and not speaking up will communicate a viewpoint B. As such, the process will continue as such until the number of people remaining silent equals the number of people sharing the viewpoint A. As soon as these numbers of people are equal, a spiral of silence information cascade will occur and people will cease to share their viewpoint.