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How information cascades induce political protests

Link: https://gigaom.com/2015/01/28/how-social-media-affects-protest-movements-its-complicated/

We are living in a world where social media plays a major role in our daily life. Through networking applications such as Twitter and Facebook, user are allowed to appropriately exercise their rights to “freedom of speech,” and post their beliefs online so other people can read and share their opinions. Social Media has evolved from a tool exclusively used by teenagers to connect with friends to a platform where professionals can propagate their ideas. As a result, since social media helps information spread so pervasively and efficiently, it has caused a political effect on protest movements. In an article written by Mathew Ingram, he pointed out that social medias helped inducing the Gezi Park Protest that happened in Turkey. Because when a majority of people share about their feeling on social medias and let other read about their stories, it induces people who have not actively spoken about the event, to join the crowd, join the movement and share their stories along. In the article, this phenomenon was explained by the fact that when people see other people sharing their feelings, it becomes “easier to take collective actions.”

From lecture we have learned that this kind of tendency is called an information cascade caused by individuals imitating the majority crowd’s behaviors. When an individual sees that a large fraction of people from his/her social networks group is joining the movement, by psychology, they will tend to join the movement as well for two possible reasons. They might question why other people are so eagerly joining the movement, and wonder if they know more information than the individual does, which is an indirect benefit. Or they might think that joining the movement like others can make him/her feel knowledgeable which is a direct benefit.

In short, social medias nowadays are much more powerful than they used to be, and it is important for every social media users to watch out and be conscious of information cascades that are potentially unintuitive.

 

 

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