Information Cascades and Echo Chambers in the 2016 Presidential Election
Many Americans were shocked when the results of this year’s presidential election started to trickle in. Donald Trump won, taking many of the swing states that Hillary was projected to win. How did this happen? Multiple sources indicated that Hillary had around a 75% chance of taking the presidency. Many people pointed to social media media as the cause of this discrepancy.
It has been revealed that during the days prior to the election, there was rampant spreading of misinformation and incorrect news articles within social media, in particular Facebook. Articles on how Trump was endorsed by the pope and articles on how an FBI agent suspected of leaking Clinton’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide were among many of the completely fake stories shared on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook are now under scrutiny because Facebook has been blamed for influencing the election results through information cascades.
Information cascades start when an initially small group of individuals share some information. We can think of sharing an article as a high signal, which tells other people that the article is credible or worth reading. Each “share” makes the article seem more appealing to subsequent Facebook users (going along with our Facebook example). As this continues, the credibility of the article increases as the number of shares increases and subsequent people who see the article will be more likely to read and perhaps even agree on it. As one might imagine, if this article is wrong, an initial endorsement can lead to a widespread sharing of false information.
Even before the sharing of these articles began, a phenomena known as “echo chambers” existed within social media. Echo chambers are created when users tend to be biased toward the information they want to view on social media. As a result, users will more likely friend other users with similar ideas/interests as them. Users will also be more likely to share and view content that supports their beliefs more. This becomes a confirmation bias of sorts.
As a result, Democrats, many of which were likely in their own echo chambers, were probably convinced that their candidate was going to win because their social media was more likely to contain content that supported Hillary. These echo chambers also tie into information cascades. Information cascades are likely to start within echo chambers, because the probability that the momentum of the cascade is going to be stopped by contradicting information is lower.
Although social media has done much to make people more connected with the world, it has also negatively impacted us by narrowing our perspectives.
Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-is-in-denial.html
https://theringer.com/social-media-echo-chamber-2016-election-facebook-twitter-b433df38a4cb#.x8vo2db6m