Election Upset Caused by Information Cascades
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/a-social-echo-chamber/article9350049.ece
This article from The Hindu discusses the concept of social echo chambers. Particularly, how they pertain to the outcome of the recent election. The article states that people’s facebooks friends tend to share similar beliefs to them. As a result, articles of certain viewpoints get repeatedly shared among groups of like-minded individuals. This sharing of articles and news stories causes those pages to be shared even more due to confirmation bias. The article mentions that people are more likely to seek out information that conforms to their beliefs. The result is what the article refers to as ‘social echo chambers’. Due to so many people sharing and re-sharing the same information within communities, members of those communities are led to believe that the propagation of media reflects the opinions of the masses. The article goes on to mention the shocking outcomes of the recent US presidential election and Brexit.
The sharing and re-sharing of articles due to confirmation bias is largely to due an information cascade within a community. Those that already hold beliefs that are reflected in an article are likely to re-share it or like it simply based on the fact that someone else shared it and they agree with the general spirit of the article. The more popular the article is, the more likely this is to happen and the more notoriety it is likely to accumulate in giant components of like-minded people (probably liberal in the context of facebook). When people absent-minded share articles because of appealing titles that align with their beliefs, others will re-share those articles because they think that the people before them actually read and analysed them.