Information Cascades. False News. Politics and Election
In class we understood the impact of information cascades and more so the impact of pluralistic ignorance – the idea that an individual incorrectly recognizes their view as being ‘away from the mainstream,’ whereas on the contrary it is quite reflective of the majority and thus the mainstream and inherently people are not fully aware of this. A recent example that was a clear reflection of the above idea can be linked to the Brexit political event earlier this summer – the main sources of media clearly presented a Bremain as a likely event, however, this represented a very poorly curated sample size and wasn’t illustrative of the ‘true,’ majority. This blog post will go on to explore the way in which networks will interact with certain flows of information (in this case ‘fake news’) and highlight the ways in which the decision making process is affected at the individual level and consequently the decision making at a collective level which can lead to a certain result (the recent elections in this case).
Leaving aside the political opinion and democratic process associated with electing the POTUS, there has been a significant and increasing impact of social media on these elections. Going back to the earlier stages of the class, we can recall that much of our information flows on social media are related to our ‘friends,’ and that leads to an expanded network of common friends and connections. Thus, in the case of the election there were several news stories on social media networks like Facebook that had declared certain inaccurate statements about a certain candidate or had prematurely declared the result of the election. We’ve found that such new information is generally believed as ‘breaking news,’ and most people in the network do not take the time to verify this information before ‘sharing,’ it. This in part explains how false news can go viral such as certain comments about a candidate or even a false declaration of the election results. We can see that a combination of a misunderstanding of ‘mainstream,’ beliefs and a spread of certain information that is untrue that only propagates a further proliferation of the inaccurate understanding of the ‘mainstream,’ view can lead to an information cascade and may cause most participants in such an interconnected network to make falsified conclusions and decisions.
As a student in the class, I’m interested in understanding the ways in which the confirmatory value associated with networks, where people make decisions based on other participant’s decision can be altered to reduce the impact of false information.