Information Cascade with Fake News
According to what we have learned on the class, an information cascade is when an individual changes their behavior based on inferences they make by observing other people. The term implies that a person does something illogical that goes against facts that they know to be true due to a strong social urge to follow a crowd. Like the Hundredth Monkey Effect, we know that the monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes before eating them. This spread across the island as the monkeys can learn by observing one another. When the number of sweet potato washing monkeys hit some critical number, ostensibly one hundred, the practice instantly jumped to other troupes of monkeys on other islands without any contact between the troupes. Today, the high technology help people even quicker to follow “Hundredth Monkey Effect”, people can read the reviews quickly on Amazon to help them make the decision.
However, no surprisingly, some of that information is false and has played a role in the dissemination of conspiracy theories and fake news — sometimes, you cannot figure out the reviews are coming from the buyers or the sellers. According to the article, Virginia Tech professor of engineering named Naren Ramakrishnan have studied ways to counter fake news with his team. We know that with the development of technology, there always appear positive and negative effects, networks help us look through the effects more clearly.
Website Links:
http://www.wowzone.com/monkey.htm
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-countering-fake-news-contagions.html