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Information Cascades in Social Media Within Our Daily Lives

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/health/social-media-fake-news.html

 

Information cascades are a phenomenon when information that people are not sure is necessarily true is passed down based off of what other people say or do before them. This is the inference of knowledge based off of what others before them have done or have decided to make a rational decision using that knowledge.

The article from the New York Times discusses how information cascades work on social media, and how it affects its users in real life. One example they discussed is Facebook and how it keeps users interested by presenting them with information that intrigues it users but takes it further by guessing what they want to see next. The article also focuses on how rumors or fiction can become big and reach wide audiences who actually believe it.

To link it back to the information we learned in class and the textbook, the information cascade that the article discusses is a little bit different from the information cascade we learned. This is because the information cascade the textbook discusses is very much related to information being passed down in response to information of someone else before them. However, the article also discusses information cascades of false information that is passed down until it becomes “fact” or widely believed instead of just focusing on the true data.

The article does touch on how there is technology or algorithms that use the idea of information cascades to predict and guess what the users may want to see next based on the previous viewers. This links back to what we learned about information cascades and shows a real life example of how this phenomenon can be used to actually implement features in apps to draw users in. Being able to create an algorithm that uses the logic of information cascades shows that the information cascades are not simply mirroring previous choices made by other people, but that there are rational inferences that need to be made to create this algorithm, much like is mentioned in the textbook.

The article also goes further to discuss the psychological logic behind the information cascade and how it relates to the cognitive biases of the human brain. This is much like how the textbook presented scenarios where one had to assume that a person WILL do this based off what knowledge is given.

Overall the article showed a great real life example of how information cascades can be used in social media and technology within our day to day lives.

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