Information Cascades on Social Media
In class we’ve recently covered the topic of information cascades. By definition, an information cascade is a phenomenon where a number of people make the same decision in a sequential fashion based on little initial information and each person’s decision is heavily influenced by observing the people before them. In essence, it’s a decision snowball effect that can start with nothing more than a single snowflake. Similar to a snowball effect, information cascades can be stopped towards its early stages, however, as they build up and gain momentum they can be extremely difficult to stop or even to slow down.
Information cascades are a constant presence in our everyday lives and often times we don’t even notice it. Their presence comes through large social media platforms such as instagram, facebook, or twitter. Everyday we are constantly berated with information cascades on our feeds, however, because they’ve grown so large we often times just accept them as fact even though there is rarely a lot of substantial information backing it. For example, the most recent rumor I’ve seen spreading around social media recently is that Pete Davidson and Emily Ratajowski are dating. The ting is though, when seen on instagram as a post with 1,000,000 likes we tend to tackle it as fact due to information cascade. After all, if 1,000,000 other people cosign or like this post and I scroll down my feed and see 10 other outlets posting the same information, it must be true, right? Wrong. All that is, is a matured information cascade that if you research all stemmed from a single twitter post, reposting an anonymous user claiming they saw Pete and Emily “holding hands”. That small bit of completely unreliable information led to a massive information cascade within a day because of the power of social media and the pack mentality. Information cascades truly are a part of our everyday lives.
Source: https://twitter.com/deuxmoiworld/status/1591846323023917057