Information Cascades stopping Terrorism
This article talks about how Arizona State University got a Minerva grant to explore how information cascades work on social media. The hope is to be able to use this information in order to counter messages sent over social media by terrorist groups. The research plans to see what kind of networks and and posts create information cascades. They are testing different types of images and seeing what reactions they elicit from people. The hope is that by finding this out, they can see what images may be used to get people to support terrorist groups, and how they spread. They also want to find out what kind of tactics create information cascades for both terrorist groups and those against them. The idea is that if you can find differences between the kinds of networks these spread in, you can try to prevent such ideas from spreading.
This relates a lot about the lectures we had about information cascades. If enough people you know spread an idea around, then you will too in order to fit in to a group. However, this adds a new perspective to it. The type of idea and image affects the threshold for creating an information cascade. So really radical ideas probably need a greater threshold because people tend not to want to be known as someone who posts radical material. It is also interesting because they touched upon the topic of different types of networks. I think clusters would play a big role, as I would think that messages that terrorists spread probably stay within their own clusters. For it to go past that cluster, it would need a very high threshold, and that could cause a huge spread. And I think that this research would help by finding out what kind of posts have a high enough threshold that these messages can perpetrate past their original clusters.
https://asunow.asu.edu/content/asu-earns-minerva-grant-study-terrorists-social-media-recruiting-power