Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia (Information Cascades)
This article assessed the impacts of information technologies and social media on politics. It begins by mentioning the impacts of social media on our society by talking about how some political figures have been using social media ads to win votes. It notes that social media sites also have the task of screening out hate speech without infringing on free speech. Recent political posts were censored because they were categorized as hate speech, begging the question, “How do these social media platforms discern this material?” The author explains that these sites use intelligent algorithms that can accurately identify hate speech, but quickly states that it does not stop information from being spread. He notes that the actual problem is information cascades and how people naturally surround themselves with people like them. If some sort of information (in this case political) enters a group, others are more likely to agree to it. As a result, that information is adapted by everyone in the group with similar interests, creating an echo chamber in which members of that group have all been exposed to the same information, while those outside do not necessarily get the same feed. It ultimately means that by showing voters information that they are more likely to agree with, those ideas are trapped in that echo chamber, preventing other, opposing ideas from coming in.
This connects to the class because we learned about how exactly information cascades can spread a particular behavior, while preventing it from going in other groups. If the threshold is low enough, and if a greater percentage of one’s friends adapted some behavior than the threshold, that person will adapt the behavior too. In this case, political information was spread in certain groups according to what they want to hear. This naturally spread the “behavior,” in this case, information that people are more willing to agree upon, to these groups and ultimately influencing their political views. Like how we learned in class, however, at a certain point, the behavior no longer spreads to another group. The author accurately asses that in the political arena, this information cascade is harmful to the public because information is trapped in one group, and it is difficult for other opinions to penetrate the group, eliminating the possibility of compromise. This can get very toxic, further splitting the public upon major issues in society, feeding people only information that they want to hear.
Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia