Cancel Culture: Empathy in Online Information Cascades
In a commentary of his book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, journalist and author Jon Ronson claims, “in the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say ‘Oh my god. I’m exactly the same’. People could connect and empathize with masses of people, and feel less lonely. However, while social media can be conducive to empathy, it can destroy it all the same. Communication becomes ambiguous with users existing in an echo chamber in which they hopefully watch their own beliefs repeated or validated in a hivemind of increasingly radial and exclusionary thought. Consequently, this makes contradicting views foreign and inaccessible to empathy, giving rise to an unique re-emergence of public shaming popularly deemed as “social media shaming.” Sometimes “social media shaming” can be good, as it can allow ordinary people to call out problematic behavior, but, other times, this diffusion of sentiment obscures empathic behavior.
In class, we learned that the diffusion of ideas depends on the public actions by one’s friends or neighbors. An information cascade occurs when enough friends publicly believe one idea, that regardless of one’s own beliefs, they choose to accept that idea as well. We can look to one popular social media site, Twitter, and see the effects of diffusion. In December 2013, Justine Sacco became the world’s number one trending Twitter topic. Before boarding onto the last leg of her plane, she had tweeted to her just 170 Twitter followers: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m White.” In the 11 hours that ensued, one of her followers tweeted it to a Gawker journalist who had tweeted it to his 15,000 followers, and “like a bolt of lightning,” the internet began to dismantle her life piece by piece. Twitter was flooded with users mirroring each other in an “echo chamber,” with people’s anger amplified and no one really fully understanding her, the others, or the situation.
We learned that individuals have a threshold for how many people they are connected to to accept the idea for them to also accept the idea regardless of their own beliefs. In Sacco’s case, it was clear that the threshold for many people had been met. A few people disagreed with the mass sentiment and pointed out that maybe it was a joke, or some broader commentary about ignorance, but it did not matter, the internet had already made up its mind. These people, in fact, got backlash in response to their divergence from public opinion, and many people backtracked on their statement to conform. In a cascade of opinion like this one, clusters of divergent opinions were simply not large or connected enough to hold up on their own.
In looking at this situation, no matter what was actually right or what Sacco really meant by her text, we see the dangers of information cascades especially on social media. People want to be accepted and respected by others, so they convey the same information back into the hivemind, polarizing the social media sphere. According to Ronson, with social media, “we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person merges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain…[but it is] not the way we actually are as people.” It many instance, diffusion of information on social media can be used for goods. We see this especially in social movements like the Black Lives Matter or #MeToo movements. However, the dangers of cascades in obscuring one’s own beliefs just to conform with the majority should not be overlooked.
Sources:
When Online Shaming Goes Too Far
https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ronson_when_online_shaming_goes_too_far?language=en
How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html