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Using Information Cascades to Predict Civil Unrest

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x3g4x/pentagon-wants-to-predict-anti-trump-protests-using-social-media-surveillance

In the wake of the many protests against the current system in the United States, whether it be the presidency or any of the controversial social issues, and the violence that ensued from many of the protests, the Pentagon is spending ample resources to find patterns in posts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and beyond to enable the prediction of major events. The goal is to predict the future events limit the violence or issues that comes with them. They cite the many protests that followed the election of President Trump and state that they could’ve been predicted using the information on the many social media platforms. “Civil unrest is associated with information cascades or activity bursts in social media, and these phenomena may be used to predict protests, or at least peaks of protest activity.” The researchers state that looking at an information cascade based on structural properties of social networks, by means of key-word defined datasets for example, can allow for the prediction of the occurrence. The article then goes on to worry that this information will be used to limit the freedom of expression and be abused to the advantage of those in power.

This relates to our study of information cascades in class. The flow of mass supported information has been seen to influence the decisions of others, whether or not they originally agreed with the idea. This works on the large scale due to smaller social networks within the global system. If many individuals of a particular friend group seem to support a certain view or idea, there is a possibility that the value of their idea/belief will pass the threshold value of another individuals belief, causing him to adopt their belief to fit with the rest or out of trust of their mass agreement. If this happens for many individuals in many separate friend groups, the value will continue to rise allowing the information to cascade and spread to many others. This information can be used by the data collectors in order to predict the possibility of an event and even the probable location of an event. If noticed that the information of the protest has cascaded, they look deeper into the individual groups and see where the largest numbers of people with the common belief are posting from. The location with the most individuals will gain the most numbers and support and can be watched as a higher probability zone for an event to occur. While protests and events of expression are allowed, this information would allow the officials to better prepare for the event in order to make sure that it is done safely and in the correct ways to prevent injury and outrage.

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