WhatsApp and The Spread of Misinformation through Information Cascades
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/technology/fixing-whatsapp-disinformation-human-nature.html?te=1&nl=morning-briefing&emc=edit_nn_20181024
This article from the New York Times called forth attention toward a certian worldwide messaging app, WhatsApp. Specifically, its ablity to spread information, true or false, with ease. Various countries worldwide, like India, Brazil, and Kenya, were subject to WhatsApp spread of misinformation and led many of its users to make bad decisions based on false information. Decisions like which political side or who to elect, or paranoia leading to mob violence based on false information can be extremely dangerous when people truly believe some piece of fake news. Recently, WhatsApp has been trying to reduce the spread of misinformation. However, the essence of WhatsApp is to have secure messages that cannot be influenced by other networks, other than the sender and the reciever. Thus, communication is the only thing that is really happening in WhatsApp, albeit at a much more rapid pace than that of simply talking face to face. Even so, WhatsApp limited the ability to forward any message up to 256 other chats and only 5 for India, and started working on a fact checker for falsified political information.
However, this attempt at reducing the spread of false information is not going to be effective. Due to the way information cascades work, there is only need for a few people to believe in some false fact in onder to cause a massive information cascade. To set this up, we can make a general model for an information cascade. Individuals in WhatsApp are the people recieving messages in certian order. They can choose to accept the message and pass it along to their friends, or they can reject it and tell their friends that the message is false. The states of the world can be called the True World and the False World, since we are dealing with false information. The True World is when the message is actually false, and the False World is when the message is still false, but people believe it to be true. Payoff will remain the same as a normal general model, and private signals can be the source of information that normal people get outside of WhatsApp. Thus, high signals are when they see the message and find contradicting information somewhere else, and low signals are when they see the message and don’t find and contradicting information. Like every other kind of information cascade, with a 1/2 probability chance that people find themselves in a False World, it only takes two low signals to begin with to start an information cascade, and if started initailly with a high signal, three low signals in a row to also start an information cascade. Even if people have a lower probability in believing the message to start with, if there are simply too many low signals, the information cascade toward the spread of misinformation can still happen.
Countries like India, Brazil, and Kenya don’t have many sources of natural, trusted information that people can read up on to reduce the chance of a low signal. According to the article, Brazil does not have a good number of sources that are considered reliable, which can be a cause to the spread of mininformation. This is most definitely a major case in how misinformation can spread. Without a means to have more high signals, or simply the ability to discern for youself what to believe in to begin with, an information cascade may not happen to begin with. Even so, once a cascade happens, high and low signals do not even matter anymore. One can imagine that any sort of information, once it is believed by en entire society, will have an extremely low chance of knowing otherwise in the real world. Without the direct information of people’s high and low signals, entire societies can be led to believe in anything. Luckily, in the real world, something like that is not so black and white. So as long as people can create original sources of information which will continually fact check prior knowledge and what the majority of what people believe to be true, we can safely say that the majority of facts we believe to be true can stay that way.