Information Cascades and Mis-Hearings
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/politics/trump-bigly-big-league-linguists.html?_r=0
In the popular classroom game of “Telephone”, a student on one end of the room whispers a phrase in their neighbor’s ear. This neighbor then whispers what they hear to their neighbor. This chain continues until the last student has been reached, who then announces what they’ve heard. The result is often completely different from the original message, much to the shock of the class (especially to the person who started the game).
Fun classroom activities aside, information cascades are a very real consequence of messaging across imperfect channels of communication. One situation in which this effect is particularly profound is during election season. During the first presidential debate, in what was meant to be a scalding comment against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump was reported to have said “I’m going to cut taxes bigly, and you’re going to rise taxes bigly.” [1] Seeing that “bigly” is a childlike and infrequently-used word, many Internet commenters assumed that his supposed use of the word demonstrated a lack of knowledge of English. Here is a sampling of some tweets the night of the debate [2]:
This wasn’t the first time commentators had discussed Trump’s usage of the word. During the GOP debate, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s Twitter account tweeted the following after Trump made a comment supposedly containing “bigly”: [3]
As this information cascade intensified after the debate, the word “bigly” massively spiked in popularity. Google Trends shows an extremely sharp growth trend during the fall of 2016, indicating that a large number of searches were done for the word [4]:
Yet despite this near-exponential growth, others are skeptical that Trump had truly said “bigly” during the debate. A few days ago, the New York Times published an article providing a different perspective: Trump is saying “big-league”, not “bigly,” according to experts. This claim was corroborated by a Trump campaign spokeswoman and a UC Berkeley professor who performed an audio analysis of a spectrogram of Trump’s speech [5]. Based on this convincing evidence, it seems that “bigly” is a mishearing of what Trump really meant.
The “bigly” phenomenon is symptomatic of a key problem in the age of instant news: information cascades are amplified. As we’ve studied in class, these cascades are often based on little information, spread wildly, and may reach empirically wrong conclusions. Based on the mis-hearings of several commentators after the debate, a large number of people have become convinced that Trump used one word instead of the other. While this might be a humorous instance of information cascades, the same phenomenon could be responsible for the spread of far more harmful and venomous misinformation. While the Internet is a powerful tool of transmission of ideas, we must be mindful of the game of “Telephone” we all play.
[1], [2] “Who, What, Why: Did Donald Trump Use the Word ‘bigly’?” BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2016. <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37483869>.
[3] Merriam-Webster. “Yes, “bigly” Is in the Dictionary. #GOPDebate Pic.twitter.com/OCf3CRs7Bp.” Twitter. Merriam-Webster, 26 Feb. 2016. Web. 28 Oct. 2016. <https://twitter.com/merriamwebster/status/703055598380785664>.
[4] “Bigly.” Google Trends. Google, n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2016. <https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=bigly>.
[5] Stack, Liam. “Yes, Trump Really Is Saying ‘Big League,’ Not ‘Bigly,’ Linguists Say.” NYTimes.com. New York Times, 24 Oct. 2016. Web. 28 Oct. 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/politics/trump-bigly-big-league-linguists.html?_r=0>.