Information Cascades and Blackout Tuesday (#BLM)
We have recently learned about Information Cascades and how people base their own decisions upon the decisions of others. Information cascades is defined as someone who observes a behavior of others and based on others behavior repeats that same behavior. For example, if we are choosing a class and a majority of the people enroll in INFO 2040, then the people signing up for that class must know something about INFO2040 that we do not. Therefore, we are likely to join the “lineup” because people rationally follow the “wisdom of the crowd”. In this blog, I will explore the recent Black Lives Movement, specifically “Blackout Tuesday”, and how that connects to information cascades.
During the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement gained a lot of support in response to the outcry of George Lyold. The movement was not just physical protests, rather the movement took off due to the help of social media. Millions of people around the world posted and shared their own stories of police brutality and injustices of being a black person in America. On June 2, 2020, a handful of artists in the music industry posted a black screen on their instagram with the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter”. Within hours, this post went from a handful of artist postings, to what seemed like everyone and their entire families posting a black screen on their Instagram. However, few did any research on what the black screen was or why people were posting it. But, because friends, family, famous people, etc were posting it, many decided to post as well. As a result, these people participated in the information cascade by posting a black screen on their Instagram.
The problem with information cascades in regards to social media activism is that this type of activism is not nearly as effective as in-person activism. Furthermore, people who posted these black screens merely because they saw everyone else posting them, are not going to be as actively involved or invested in the movement. Rather, they are posting because they rationally want to “follow the crowd” and will likely forget about the movement when the next big thing comes around. The problem in this specific example of Blackout Tuesday is that the information cascade actually hurt the movement by drowning out vital information under the Black Lives Matter hashtag. With millions around the world posting a black square with the BLM hashtag it hid critical information and replaced it with millions of worthless black boxes that did not help the movement. This demonstrates how the wrong information in a information cascade can have counterproductive/negative outcomes that are hard to overcome because of the mere size that some of these information cascades can grow to. Nevertheless, Blackout Tuesday is a prime example of an information cascade that grew rapidly to involve much of the U.S. population within a day, but who’s effectiveness was highly questionable.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21277852/blackout-tuesday-posts-hiding-information-blm-black-lives-matter-hashtag