Spread of Info In Social Media
https://gizmodo.com/halle-gunman-confesses-to-livestreamed-shooting-allege-1838986830
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/09/business/twitch-germany-shooting.html
These articles are about the recent awful tragedy in Germany. Like many of the ones that has happened before, the suspect utilized social media and other online forums to spread their way of thinking. Because of this, there are many analyses around this spread of information and research into how to stop it from spreading further. The articles lists the many platforms the suspect used. Megan Squire, a senior fellow with the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right and researches online extremism, made an analysis on how videos were spread through Telegram. According to her research, the information was able to spread to 15k+ users within 30 minutes. Since Telegram is a forwarding platform, she uses a direct graph to represent the spread of information. In hopes of trying to prevent more tragedies like these, many countries and websites are blocking domains or establish policies that would ban these types of content.
In class, we use these graphs and concepts for simple examples and demonstrations, however, there are many real world uses for these concepts in hopes of saving lives. Social media and networks have become ingrained in our lives. Information spreads like wildfire with no way of stopping. Using the concepts we are learning in class, there are researchers, law enforcements, and governments that are able to find out how this sort of information spreads and exactly how to mitigate it. Despite the simplicity and low stakes in the examples that are brought up in class, there are real important applications. An important aspect in all of this are social media companies such as Facebook, Twitch, etc. Many of them were designed originally for sharing things with friends with no real consequences in the real world, but now, they are in the spotlight and they must act to prevent the spread of hatred. The people who created these platforms would never have thought that their small websites would have become this large and this powerful. However, now they must use the concepts we have in class about social networks to moderate and control the flow of information on their platforms for the greater good.