Diffusion and Media Censorship
Recent news has it that in China, two people from the Inner Mongolia province and traveled to Beijing were diagnosed with pulmonary plague. The plague is highly contagious and can be transmitted through in-person contacts via droplets in the air. While prevention measures have been immediately implemented to check the diffusion of the disease, the officials seem equally concerned about the spread of related news on social media. In fact, according to the news report, censors have taken actions to remove “the hashtag ‘Beijing confirms it is treating plague cases’ as they tried to control discussions — and panic — around the disease.”
The theory of diffusion is very useful to explain how information spreads online as well as account for censors’ response to unwanted hashtag/news spread on social media. I would also recommend the book I am currently reading, called Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci because it provides theoretical support for the phenomena of online spread. On social media, as long as the news on the diagnosis of people with the plague comes out, it is sure to cause heated discussions and feelings of concern among social media users, especially those in Beijing and think they are closer to the plague and risk. News and relevant hashtags would gather lots of attention on social media; as more and more people click on the hashtags, emotions of panic and upset would be commonly felt, amplified, and diffused across netizens in this networked community. Since hashtags on Weibo, China’s largest social media app, are ranked based on popularity (calculated by factors including the click-through-rate, number of posts with the hashtag, etc.), the hashtag on the plague is likely to generate a network effect, causing exponential attention and discussion from the public. Even the cluster of people who don’t use social media but learn from friends and families who do will begin to know about the plague.
Realizing the mechanism behind diffusion and to prevent the spread and cause public unrest, censors scrubbed the relevant hashtag so that no further discussions are made on the topic. In a networked community, the decision or action of each individual is, to some extent, influenced by his or her neighbors. Media censorship, though anti-democratic as is widely believed, is nevertheless one tactic to combat undesirable diffusion by stopping the information source at one point and forbidding it from moving beyond. Information that seems sensitive, seditious, or harmful is usually suppressed. Nevertheless, there are huge complexities around media censorship; so is the prediction on information diffusion that might end up in a totally different trajectory.