Information Cascade Trends on Twitter in the COVID-19 Era
Disclaimer: I decided to explore this topic as Professor Easley mentioned it in class and I found it very interesting.
It has been almost two years since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in China on November 17, 2019. It halted society forcing billions to quarantine at home and, sadly, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths. As we emerge from this devastating era, part of the success is due to the COVID-19 vaccine. There are many options out there such as Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, etc. each with its own level of support. However, these vaccines have devolved into a political and cultural debate mainly over social media as many contest the necessity of the vaccine.
The academic paper titled, “Covid or not Covid? Topic Shift in Information Cascades on Twitter” discusses the role of information cascades in the debate over Covid and vaccine conspiracies mainly on Twitter. This paper analyzes topic shifts in various cascades and classified a movement from one tweet to another as a hop. I found it incredibly interesting how Twitter users are able to take a tweet and extract different meanings out of it. Based on figure 1 from the article, even from something as simple as “The overwhelming majority of people recover from this virus,” many use it as justification for Trump’s success or that COVID-19 isn’t a big deal – bizarre extrapolations. People are able to easily hop from one topic to another which is borderline hilarious. However, the most interesting conclusion that the researchers found is that Twitter information cascades may be cyclic. They found that the first 3 hops from the source tweet are quite outlandish; however, the fourth hop results in tweets that are much more similar to the source tweet. This makes me think that eventually in a cascade, large hops/jumps can eventually lead back to the original message. Also, these information cascades with false narratives were found to often be terminated by tweets from healthcare professionals. The input of undisputable information was enough to end wild “hops.” When I first read this conclusion, I was quite skeptical as I believe the internet, mainly Twitter, has the ability to twist anything to fit its own narrative. However, the research showed otherwise and, as a believer in science, I am glad that it did.
This resource connects to Networks as it discusses information cascades which is a topic we delved into. We have explored how it is related to people influencing others, following crowd phenomenon, sequential decision making, and its relation to probability. In a lecture, we looked at a herding experiment where information went sequentially from one student to another in an effort to guess the majority color in an urn. The student-to-student “hop” is directly similar to a “hop” from tweet to tweet. One student’s announcement has the possibility of affecting another student’s announcement. This influence is heavily explored in the academic paper but in a social media setting focused on COVID-19. Many use one tweet to extrapolate their own thoughts and conclusions which are oftentimes absurd. Overall, I was very intrigued by how a classroom concept (that I already found quite cool) is directly related to a phenomenon that the world is currently stuck in.
Reference Article: https://aclanthology.org/2020.rdsm-1.3.pdf