Another day, another Filter Bubble phenomenon from the Facebook feed.
Unless to you are a social media luddite, you experienced it too: After “Ding dong the Laden is dead” choruses swept the nation yesterday morning, a quiet backlash of peace and love had blanketed the Walls of Facebook and Twitter by early evening. Everybody and their Buddhist aunt had posted:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr
An apt quote from MLK to express the sentiment that, perhaps, our cheers were unseemly.
A little too apt. As Megan McArdle at the Atlantic pointed out by 6:23pm, King had never uttered or penned those words. It seems the well meaning pacifist posters were unwitting participants in a misinformation cascade.
But just as quickly the misquote had conquered the internet, almost as quickly did McArdle’s post beat it into a hasty retreat.
The episode has a lot to tell us about how (mis)information cascades operate. Every Malcolm Gladwell devotee is familiar with the basic idea of a cascade; information or behaviors (like wearing hush puppies) can slowly trickle through a population, but sometimes – when a “tipping point” of people catch on – the fad can wildfire. What causes that burst is a set of ingredients that Network Theorists are still trying to understand.
One ingredient is how primed the population is for a meme. In the MLK case, it’s clear there was a turn-the-other-cheek zeitgeist just waiting to be awakened. If the MLK quote hadn’t existed, it would have been invented, as they say. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened.
The second consideration is the cost of signing on to a fad. Putting up the payment for a Prius will require deliberation even if all your eco-friends are doing it. A seemingly free task of forwarding an email also costs – in effort – and may make a potential cascade contributor pause a moment and wonder “is this really worth sending?” But posting a cool quote on Facebook? Presto, it’s done.
The final factor is how closely we are connected. Memes have a hard time seeping through sparse information connections, but in the closely knit age of 250 Friends and Twitter followers, information has no problem flooding a social network.
But, as some theorists have theorized, a really dense information network will be impervious to fads. How’s that? If we’re all getting information from hundreds of friends, there’s a good chance that any meme you get from a handful of friends will be antidoted by info from another set of friends. It’s similar to the theory that information cascades are actually kind of fragile; just as they can flare up, they can be easily doused by one authoritative correction (see page 503).
Megan McArdle was just such an authority. By this morning, the spate of MLK-quoting tweets had been replaced by an equal flow of MLK-debunkers. The one lone quote I saw on Facebook, was quickly corrected.
What does all that tell us about Filter Bubbles? It supports the theory that when information freely flows, mis-truths have a tough time taking hold. OLB’s death was one of those occasions that we were all paying attention. The posts and tweets were flying with enough frequency and velocity that bubbles didn’t really stand a chance. It was a rare, bubble-free day.
But normally we’re sharing information with fewer people – and with people who think a lot like ourselves. In normal times we’re less likely to come across a debunking McArdle to counteract a mis-truth (that’s why sites like Snopes still stay in business).
Perhaps more significantly, misinformation is rarely as un-loaded as a mis-attributed quote. For a variety of political, ideological and cognitive reasons, on many topics we’ll hold on to false information no matter how much it gets corrected. But that’s a blog post for another day…
(cross-posted from thefilterbubble.com)
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