The effects networks play on user’s political beliefs and the spread of information (and misinformation…)
Yes, I’d lie to you…
Here is the link to the article : https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/cs2850_2016fa/blog-guidelines.pd
Though the first section of this article is a political commentary on the current election, it is followed by a huge commentary on the role social media is playing in the current election — specifically, the effect of users’ sharing news articles with both accurate and inaccurate information. It appears in most cases, the accuracy of information has no effect on its virality. This is a pretty scary, as research also suggests the effects of social media are matching if not surpassing the effects that ACTUAL news has on the election. As social media becomes more and more prevalent, the graphs formed by users and their social circles will play an increasing role on each other’s political beliefs, as articles are presumably shared between them. This trend marks a new political age.
This article pertains to our class by demonstrating how a real-world network (a graph similar to those we saw on the first day) has a huge social impact. In this case, the graph Donald Trump created by having 11 million twitter followers enables him to spread information like wildfire, regardless of its truthness. Although other candidates also have a network of related graph nodes, theirs tends to be much more limited. It is probably also possible to assign some sort of weight to each social media relationship (like the weights of graph edges) based on the closeness of the friends, whether one pays heed to the opinions of the other, etc.