How Information Cascades in Social Media Influence Politics
As nowadays social media are widely used, people receive tons of information and learn about news via social media every day. In this way, due to information cascades, the major voices in social media become really important and powerful. To be specific, an information cascade occurs when people make decisions one after another rather than all at the same time; later people just watch the actions of earlier people and follow the earlier ones’ decisions. As a result, when making decisions regarding to politics, like voting in an election, people are usually influenced by the other people’s decisions in their social networks.
Antone has mentioned an example in his article: based on information cascades and news-feeding algorithms, if an individual is a likely Democrat, Facebook will show posts by his friends that support the same political views but repress those they would clash. Because Facebook knows what kind of news the users like and would mostly only show that on users’ home pages, by only reading the news whose political views the users are likely to agree with, the users are actually sheltered from new ideas. The users are largely just following what their friends agree with.
However, we can think about this from an opposite perspective. Since information cascades have played an important role in deciding individuals’ political views, politician can actually take advantage of this principle. Based on Can cascades be predicted?, the researchers have generated formula about how many times the similar news feed or same photo posts should be shown to a group users that an information cascade would likely be created in the group. Therefore, information cascades are actually controllable. Politicians can make use of this idea and expose potential voters to a large amount of news favorable to themselves and gain new supporters.
Sources:
Analysis —Senate Intelligence Hearing On Fake News, Free Speech And Russia
Can cascades be predicted?
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www14-cascades.pdf