Social Media and Feedback Loops
In the age of growing technology and wide spread social media use, the distribution of information has become increasingly easy and unregulated. Through social media feedback loops, news, fake or real, are easily spread around and once they start to spread, they continue to do so. Click-bait titles and sensational titles encourage social media users to repost and share articles without actually confirming the content in them. As a result, once that user’s friends have seen the post, the cycle starts again and continues to repeat with each subsequent repost and share. Through this endless cycle, different groups with malicious intent are able to influence individuals though made-up stories to further their personal agendas. While there are methods to control feedback loops such as changing certain properties of the feedback mechanism, using alternative platforms, and video framing, they are not completely effective and still allow for the proliferation of feedback loops.
This article highlights the idea of the “small world phenomenon” that we learned in class. For any two nodes in a network, there are at most “six degrees of separation,” or that the path between the two nodes is at most 6 connections long. Because of how interconnected social media is, information easily travels between nodes and spreads. Especially with bots, created with the intention of spreading misinformation and easily forming weak ties to many users in the social network, news can start at several nodes at once, and theoretically reach the rest of the population of the network. In a network such as that of facebook, there are multiple paths that information can take to reach node, thus speeding up the process even more. Because most networks only have one giant component, information designed to be shared and reposted will easily be disseminated to the rest of the network.
https://qz.com/1714598/information-feedback-loops-make-social-media-more-dangerous/