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Information Cascade in Sexual Harassment Incidence

Article link: https://www.ft.com/content/6973e6d6-d047-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

This article talks about how the national environment for sexual harassment has changed in recent years and the author uses information cascade to explain this phenomenon. The author talks about how recently sexual harassment scandals are consistently in people’s spotlight. Although for now it only involves people in politics and entertainment, there are expectations that scandals in other fields such as business will be exposed soon as well. The author then raised a question: why countrywide reckoning is formed now and not five years ago? The number of sexual harassment incidents hasn’t really changed in recent years but public reckoning becomes more and especially widespread this year.

Although Trump, as the author stated, can potentially be a reason, the author attributed this social change to the formation of the information cascade. When the internet was not widely available, when women and men encountered sexual harassment, the only thing the can do is to seek help from the judicial system. However, the process may take years and people with power can also easily intervene – therefore, most of the time victims don’t really have any effective way to fight back.

However, as the internet becomes more easily accessible to the public, victims can just post things on their social network and gain attention from the public – cyber networks empower victims and make speaking up easier. Once people start doing this, isolated victims can rally into a crowd. And one by one, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, not only will the information passes to more people, but also will people start blaming and shaming the transgressor – and this trend will follow, as an information cascade is formed.

However, the information cascade formed can be both good and bad. What good about it is that people who receive this information later will follow the actions taken by previous people and consequently pressuring the government to investigate – which help the victim. However, it may turn into a witch-hunting – what if at the beginning the information is wrong? Who should be responsible? There are questions yet to be answered.

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