How Information Cascades Can Ruin Someone’s Life
Hearing that someone is “cancelled” is something that is a part of common everyday conversations. In other words, they are culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career. Cancel culture is a new phenomenon that has changed the way we interact with each other and has invoked fear in people from voicing their opinions. It can be defined as the mass withdrawal of support from public figures or celebrities who have done things that aren’t socially accepted today. This practice of “cancelling” or mass shaming often occurs on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook (Demetria Slyt). Even though cancel culture may have negative implications, it can also be used as a powerful tool to offer voices to the voiceless as everyone has a say in the free online world and are able to strip away power from those in superior positions. However, most times when people cancel a celebrity, they do not have full knowledge of what the celebrity did, they just know that they are now cancelled. Cancel culture relies on an information cascade since we easily fall into a hive-mind where what we believe does not lie in our own knowledge and signals but, rather, within the actions of other people.
One of the main reasons these information cascades work is because individuals are usually criticized if they go against the public opinion. In other words, they can get “cancelled” themselves for supporting someone that the mass community has ostracized. An example of this is the recent DaBaby controversy where he went to a concert and made homophobic remarks as well as offended people with HIV/AIDS. After this, DaBaby was trending on twitter for weeks deeming him cancelled and it was said that no one should listen to his music or put him in anymore shows. This has a cascading effect as people believe that if you continue to support them then you are also in support of the comments that they made and that you do not believe in holding them accountable for their actions.
While in DaBaby’s scenario most people would agree that you should not support someone who made those remarks, there are several other scenarios where the person who got “cancelled” was misinterpreted or were voicing their opinions on subjects that harmed no one else. In these cases, even if people wanted to defend or agree with the public figure, they would go against it as it is not worth them getting criticized over. This phenomenon therefore is a good display of information cascades as people are just observing the actions of others to see how they reacted to the controversy and even though they might know the context behind the situation more or do not know why the earlier person chose this decision, they follow the other person as they believe this is in their best interest. Therefore, even though information cascades can be very useful, we should be careful where they exist otherwise and the implications it can have on others.
https://www.columbian.com/news/2020/aug/02/everywhere-and-nowhere-the-many-layers-of-cancel-culture/
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch16.pdf
https://onezero.medium.com/can-cancel-culture-be-cancelled-fb897dbe3184