Cascades and Misinformation
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/technology/social-medias-globe-shaking-power.html?_r=0
The spread of misinformation on social media is astounding, having the ability to influence the decisions of a big proportion of the population. This is fundamentally linked to how information cascades can be wrong: a population will still accept a bad choice. For example, there was a fake story about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump was shared almost one million times. According to Professor Zeynep Tufekci it is likely that tens of millions of people saw this story. He also points out that a correction was barely heard and that Facebook had a significant influence on the election’s outcome. Now, Facebook has to evaluate the power they have over how people’s lives are affected by the content they consume daily on their feeds.
On social media platforms, a story can spread around the world in an extremely short amount of time. The number of people that can be reached is enormous. Information cascades can start off of very little information and are very easy to trigger. Now especially, our highly networked online presence aids the formation of information cascades. The article that I linked points out how this phenomena is causing an even wider effect, that is creating movements that tap into the dissatisfaction of the working class with the status quo. With almost a quarter of the human population using Facebook, it has become the primary tool for ideas to spread.
Due to the speed at which news spreads, both Google and Facebook have prohibited sites that traffic fake news from making a profit off spreading misinformation. The amount of information we consume that is fed to us on the internet is staggering. We can observe that social media and the information that comes along with it has altered the course of major global events. Companies should dive deeper into this aspect of the technology and culture, and take necessary measures to have control over bad content.