Social Media and the Spread of Harmful Ideas
In the USA Today article, “Social media threat: People learned to survive disease, we can handle Twitter,” Glenn Reynolds relates the spread of disease and ideas in the 21st Century. Reynolds begins by discussing the rapid spread of disease when cities first developed. When humans transitioned from small independent hunters and gatherers to centralized communities, diseases wiped out populations in a way simply not possible before. He attributes this to the sudden increase in population density and the subsequent decrease in sanitation. Reynolds argues that we are seeing a similar phenomenon with the ways ideas spread. Indeed, social media acts in a similar way as the first cities; we now have significantly increased the average person’s exposure to others’ ideas. Since this is a relatively new phenomenon, we do not have any way of monitoring the spread of potentially harmful ideas, just as limited sanitation allowed diseases to spread so rapidly. As a solution, Reynolds argues that we can help mitigate the effect of harmful ideas by emphasizing critical thinking, so people can better determine the validity of the information they come across on social media.
Much of the article’s ideas are rooted in network theory and how we model the spread of disease. Certainly, just as cities increased the contact humans had with each other, social media has drastically increased our exposure to new ideas. Unfortunately, as the article points out, relatively new phenomena such as fake news, many of these ideas can have a negative impact on an individual. If our goal was to reduce the spread of these harmful ideas, we could attempt to reduce the value of k as discussed in class; in other words, reduce the number of harmful ideas the average person comes across. Perhaps, one way to do this would be to reduce the average person’s time spent on social media a day. However, this is not the only option. We might also attempt to reduce p, the probability that one experiences the negative effects of a harmful post should they come across one. To do this, the article suggests we better enable people to judge the quality of the information they are exposed to. A much more controversial option would be a form of automated censorship, which has become easier to implement due to machine learning advancements. Governments across the world censor information before it reaches their citizens, why not a machine?
Article URL: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/20/social-media-threat-people-survived-disease-we-can-handle-twitter-glenn-reynolds-column/879185001/