Social Media’s Effect on Protesting
As we’ve learned in class, Information Cascades occur when people need to make a decision and are able to take others’ decisions into account. The basic principle is that people’s decisions are affected by the decisions of others, because their decisions provide new information to the decider. For example, if a person can’t decide between two competing brands in a store, the brand that’s being sold out more is more likely to be best, since more people order it. Thus, the person chooses this brand over the other, which makes it more popular in turn and causes others to choose it as well.
Social media is the source of many information cascades, such as event attendance like protests. According to the article “How social media affects protest movements: It’s complicated“, information cascades have a significant impact on protester turnout, which protests succeed, and which fall flat. A protest can be scheduled on Facebook, or people might spike the idea of a protest topic/concern by creating a hashtag on Twitter. If enough people decide to accept the invite on Facebook or post the hashtag on Twitter based solely on their interest in the event, other people who might have been indifferent otherwise will see how a significant portion of people are involved and feel obligated to become involved as well.
This relates to class because the number of Facebook event attendees or how much a hashtag is trending provides new information to the decider. This is an information cascade, because if the event or hashtag doesn’t reach a certain critical amount of shares, the protest (for example) will fall flat because others will think it’s not worth becoming involved. However, once a critical point is reached, others wary of involvement will see that large number of people already involved and use this new information to decide that it’s something they should get involved with too. Thus, they will join, and increase the number of attendees so more people get involved. Thus, social media causes some protests to fall flat and other to become huge, due to information cascades.