Kony 2012: Cascading Away
Source: http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/09/are-you-the-member-of-a-herd/
You might recall the “Kony 2012” movement which swept the U.S. as fast as one could update their Facebook status. It all started with a YouTube video posted by a non-profit organization, which was specifically targeted towards young social media users. With over 112 million views after the end of the first week, it’s safe to say that their plan worked. But just as quickly as it rose in popularity, “Kony 2012” died with a couple months. Why the sudden rise and fall? According to Max Border’s article, the culprit is information cascade.
As we learned in class, an information cascade occurs when decisions are made based on the discussions you’ve observed others make, and not any of your own intuition or input. In the case of “Kony 2012”, the original video posted was well liked and accepted among a starting number of viewers. These viewers posted the video on social media sites, or referenced it to all their friends. This is when information cascade took over. Acceptance of the video skyrocketed, as viewers saw that all of their friends are accepting the video, they too accept it, even if they had their own conflicting opinions. So why did interest in the movement plunge to the floor roughly two months after it began? From lecture, we know that injecting information into a network exhibiting information cascade can significantly stop or alter the cascade. This is exactly what happened in this case. When the media and social networks erupted with statements saying that the movement was really just a planned marketing scheme, the information cascade was halted almost immediately. This is visible in the plot below, showing the interest in “Kony 2012”. In February, the interest spikes up, and only two months (shown as D in the plot), the interest plunged down to almost zero.
