Network Structure of Social Media and Information Cascade Lead to Social Polarization Online
Social media has had a bad reputation for making society more polarized. We often blame the users for staying within echo chambers and refusing to read the other side of the story. However, the users may indeed make rational choices when choosing to agree or disagree with some arguments on social media although they are following the trend. In fact, certain features such as “like” and “following” of social media may be the prime contributors in creating information cascades on social media, leading to polarization.
When we tried to analyze information cascade in class, we assume that people make decisions in sequences and every person can observe his private information and the actions of those who moved previously. This is very similar to how social media works. The decision is to like or dislike the blog. The user knows his own judgment and can infer the decisions of those who have seen the blog by interpreting the number of “likes”. Then, he makes his own decision. The audience tends to favor the blog if he notices a lot of likes. Since social media feeds popular posts to the users, the users are more likely to read posts with a lot of “likes”. Additionally, they can only see the number of “likes” but not the number of “dislikes” or “angry”. The users may misinterpret that previous people all like the post. According to our analysis of information cascade, it is a rational decision to follow what previous people do. Therefore, social media provides a friendly setting for information cascade to develop.
In addition to the friendly setting for information cascades, the network structure of social media is another prime contributor to the polarization of online society. The linked article makes several experiments, finding out that echo chambers do not make people more polarized. After interacting with like-minded peers, the participants actually adopted a more moderate opinion. Unfortunately, the structure of social media limits this kind of interaction with equality among every participant. Most of the social networks of social media are centralized. It contains some people (nodes) that have considerably more connections to other nodes (i.e. they have considerable followers), giving them more influences. The majority of nodes remained isolated from others. Therefore, the information these marginal nodes can get is in fact filtered by the influential ones. In addition to that, the marginal users consider the influential accounts’ blogs more accurate, suppressing their personal information, and falling into an information cascade.
In a nutshell, though users form echo chambers on social media, we should be aware that certain social media features, including friendly setting for information cascades and centralized network, play critical roles in polarization. Thus, in addition to encourage users to develop critical thinking skills, we can also improve the functions of social media to mitigate the social media effect of tearing society.