Information Cascades and the Terror in Paris
https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/19/paris-and-the-trail-of-social-media-misinformation/
An information cascade is a two step process that begins when one individual faces a binary decision. Secondly, outside factors begin to influence the decision through observation. An information cascade forms when people begin to copy decisions of people prior to them due to the fact that they believe these prior peoples decisions convey information. Examples of information cascades include fads, fashion, media, voting, etc. All of these examples can be clearly seen as to why they are information cascades, as people’s decisions in these topics are commonly affected and changed due to public and prior opinion. A huge mathematical tool used to define and track information cascades is Bayes Rule, which is a conditional probability model. It is used to describe the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that relate to the event on hand.
This article I am examining is how social media, especially in the wake of terror or horror, turns into an information cascade that spreads false information and can greatly affect people’s decisions. As this article portrays, after the terror attack in Paris, social media had a frenzy spreading false information and accusation. After the attack, a Sikh man was photo-shopped wearing a suicide vest and holding up the Quran, when in fact it was just an Ipad. Information spread rapidly that the Eiffel tower had gone dark in memory for the victims, when in fact it does that every night at 1 a.m. These examples show how information cascades can rapidly grow and flourish on social media, as all people have access to posting and viewing, so therefore false information can spread easily and thus begin to affect people’s decisions and biases. Coye Cheshire describes how the social media aftermath following this terror attack is a perfect example of an information cascade. He describes a cascade as when “an observer sees something and does the exact same thing despite one’s own beliefs or other private information to the contrary. This point made about denying private information pointing to the contrary relates to the idea of signals discussed in the class. These signals are information that help people make decisions, but as we see in this article and from the class, these signals may get ignored or forgotten once a cascade has ensued.
Finally, the article goes into a couple types of psychological biases that help information cascades form and that help skew and distort people’s decisions and ideas. First, the author discusses the anchoring bias, which is when people tend to greatly stick to their first impressions. Another bias he believes affected this social media frenzy was confirmation bias, which is when people spread rumors and look for information that they want to be true. Finally, the author believes this social media cascade may have occurred solely due to the desire of people to be popular. All of these theories would form and push the cascade, as they lead people to believe things that may not to be true and thus are willing to spread and believe this information. Overall, the author ends his article with an idea we have discussed in class, how the internet is very powerful and connected, and thus will always be able to spread valuable information as well as false slanderous information. Information cascades are a huge part of the reason as to why the internet has this power.