ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Cascade
In 2014, the ALS “Ice Bucket Challenge” movement took over the internet with videos of people pouring a bucket of ice over their heads. The campaign’s purpose was to raise awareness and raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. This is relevant to our discussion of cascades, particularly through social media. The idea is that people who are connected by a network have the ability to affect each other’s behavior and decisions.
When I first saw videos on Facebook, I thought it seemed like a strange way to raise money for a cause, but the movement became viral as more and more people were being nominated to participate. My only question was, would the Ice Bucket Challenge be successful in its efforts? Intuitively, you would expect it to be effective for spreading global awareness because if person A creates a video of himself doing the Ice Bucket Challenge and shares it on Facebook, A’s friends, or social network, would see the video challenge and then most likely share the video or also choose to participate, demonstrating the start of an information cascade: decisions being made sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what earlier people knew, like the campaign being used to support a good cause therefore everyone should join the movement. Furthermore, the mechanism of calling out friends to also take action by “tagging” them on social media made the challenge feel personal, thus by nature people were inclined to accept the challenge as well because otherwise they jeopardized damaging their reputation. Additionally, with more videos being produced, each participant gets a little more creative, raising the bar of the competition to make a better video than what’s already been done.
Nevertheless, the bigger concern for this challenge was if it would be effective for raising money for treatment and research. And the answer is yes. According to the articles, the viral campaign raised over $115 million for the ALS Association. It turns out that $77 million, 67 percent, went to research. Lead researcher Philip Wong, a professor at Johns Hopkins, stated that “without [the campaign, they] wouldn’t have been able to come out with the studies as quickly as [they] did,” highlighting that information cascades on social media platforms are indeed very effective.