Information Cascades and Social Media
In the study I found “Information Cascades in Social Media in Response to a Crisis: a Preliminary Model and Case Study’ by Cindy Hui et. al. they discuss how network cascades work in relation to social media and use a crisis as a way where information needs to be shared quickly. The reason why information needs to be shared is to warn and inform people, they will be observing how messages spread in these situations and when individuals make decisions to retweet. Retweeting is a form of an information cascade since individuals are following the actions of others and are deciding what to share and which of their followers to share this information with. In this study they found that if a user is affected and influenced by the right sources, this will result in them retweeting it and sharing the message. Once one user retweets a message, an information cascade will occur. “Information cascades originate from information sources and propagate through users that ‘follow’ the information source when the user retweets the message”. They found that most retweets and therefore an information cascade originates from local media sources and key users within the observed community and that the cascades tend to reach wide but not long essentially terminating after it has been shared onces meaning that this small network is a cluster of sorts.
I think it is quite interesting to apply these ideas of information cascades and social media not only to crisis situations but to situations where something is blowing up in the media or something that is really prevalent at the moment. For example in terms of reposts, which are essentially serving the same purpose as retweets, when a lot of my friends and the people I follow post for something, I feel compelled to as well. Today I checked instagram and the new trending thing was post a pic of your pet and plant a tree, and it is all over my instagram feed. Once one person posted it, it was immediately everyone diffusing down the network. I felt pressured to repost this (I mean who doesn’t want an excuse to post about their dogs) but, had I not seen all of my friends posting this and multiple of them at that, I would not have posted this. I realized that I was experiencing an information cascade and was being influenced by the majority of my friends posting this same thing. I had never really considered just how much I relied on the information which my strong ties to in the network were giving off to influence what I was posting, but I have realized that this actually is the case and that if all of my friends are doing something but no one else is, I will still be inclined to do it because of the very topics we have been learning in class and the idea of network cascades, clusters, and diffusion throughout the network.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2187980.2188173