How an Information Cascade Ruined a Small Town
Twin Falls, a small town in Idaho with an increasing amount of Middle Eastern refugees (especially Syrian), saw a case where a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old refugee male from Iraq and Sudan were accused of committing some form of sex act with a 5-year-old girl. Due to extreme events that recently occurred in Germany and in Florida, many anti-muslim groups sought to use this example to incite more hatred against these middle eastern refugees. With the police withholding most information due to the fact that those involved are all minors, people began making up “fake news” that spread through blog posts and local newspapers.
This is an example of information cascade. Despite the fact that the town is still more than 80% white, despite of the fact that the accused were from Iraq and Sudan, despite the fact that there was no specific evidence released to the public, news articles and blog posts labeled this event as a typical example of Islam-based violence which is part of the “Muslim take-over” of America. This event even made it onto the headline of a news article as a little girl that had been gang-raped by Syrian refugees at knife point. The spread of continually exaggerated “facts” and misleading lies eventually blew this small-town incident into one where the mayor and other town officials lives were threatened. Instead of waiting for official facts and news sources to reveal the truth, the biased writers of racist blogs or newspapers fed their information off one another, making decisions based on the information of the biased source before them.
“https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/magazine/how-fake-news-turned-a-small-town-upside-down”