Viral social media stories?

When we think of the many ways social media has transformed our information worlds, one specter that comes to mind is that of the viral story - a news event that may be ignored by the lame-stream, but that seeps its way into Twitter or FB, slowly catches on (or flares immediately) and eventually saturates our online social networks.

But, while those events may or may not exist, they are probably exceedingly rare, according to a 2012 paper by Sharad Goel, Duncan Watts and Daniel Goldstein. Those researchers tracked 80,000 Twitter stories to see what the typical "cascade" (wave of retweets started by a single tweet) looked like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 95% of cascades can't really be called such - they are made up of a single tweet that never gets retweeted. 

But, the authors ask, even though most cascades never really happen, might there be enough huge cascades that they end up making up most (or much) of our social media news-stream. Not so. When we do retweet news stories we do so from the source; 60% of retweets aren't branching off from long information cascades, but are simply retweeting the story from its origin.

Of the 80,000 stories the researchers tracked, only about 0.001% make it out past 5 waves of retweets, suggesting that viral news stories are - if anything - extremely rare. The authors suggest instead that what may seem like viral social media stories may, in fact, be spread by the traditional media - and that they saturate our social media walls because everyone is picking up the story from, say, CNN or the Washington Post.

It could be, though, that the researchers' sample was too small to pick up the "mega-cascades" that we imagine are a unique feature of social media. The "Trayvon Martin" stories, which circulate for weeks on social media before being picked up by traditional media may be, truly, 1 in a million - or billion - rather than 1 in 80,000.

Still, the authors' findings make it hard to deny that the vast majority of news stories we see on Twitter are either initial tweets or one-off retweets - and that super cascades are the tiniest sliver of the news we see. Of the stories swirling around social media, almost all are stories users find from outside Twitter and bring into the network for a single exposure. It's show and tell rather than a game of telephone.

That would mean that what really matters for determining what we see in social media is not what people re-post, but rather what they find from the outside media and decide is important enough to post themselves.

open-minded conservatives?

I'm not 100% sure what to make of it, but - according to research from Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro - it looks like conservatives spend a lot more time hanging around liberal websites than liberals do on conservative sites.

Here's Gentzkow and Shapiro's breakdown of who visits the ten top conservative and liberal sites:

Conservative sites visitors

Liberal sites visitors

Assuming we trust their data, one explanation for the imbalance could simply be that there are tons more conservatives visiting all political sites; if that were the case, even if liberals and conservatives had similar biases toward consuming like-minded media, we'd still see more conservatives on liberal sites. But my guess is there aren't that many more conservatives lurking online.

Another possible explanation is that - as suggested in the title - conservatives are more open-minded than liberals. Either that or they are more willing to check out what the opposition is saying. That story is somewhat plausible; other research suggests that savvy ideologues are more inclined (than less informed ideologues) to click on "counter-attitudinal" articles because they're more comfortable debunking any opposing views they may happen to bump into.

Still, it's curious why you'd see so many more conservative ideologues venturing into liberal waters than vice versa. The final explanation I can come up with - and one that suits my lefty leanings - is that "liberal sites" aren't as liberal as "conservative sites" are conservative; that is, that a conservative visiting DailyKos is more likely to come across information he can jive with than a liberal is going to find on RushLimbaugh. In other words, liberal websites - as opposed to conservatives readers - are the ones who are open-minded.

Any other interpretations out there?

a note on Robin Williams and suicide

I am sad at Robin William's passing, but only sad for myself - not for Robin Williams. 

If I may, I suggest others not be sad for him either. To be so would be to assume that his last moments were filled with despair, confusion and a powerlessness to choose life. That might be an apt assumption to make for a sixteen year old who has been bullied and does not have the perspective to know that "it will get better," but not for a 63 year old artistic genius who has, very likely, lived a life far richer and deeper - in experience, emotion and wisdom - than I, at least, can hope for. His last moments may have been confused and despairing or they may have had a clarity of thought and welling of spirit that is beyond my understanding. I don't know. 

I do suspect, however, that we have a bias against suicide - that we see it as uniformly negative. While there are many reasons that is a good bias to have (not least, for perpetuating the species), I leave open the possibility that sometimes the choice of death is not something to feel sad about - but to respect, honor and maybe even admire.

Facebook polis

If you have a Facebook account which you visited even once in early August, you could not have missed it; Facebook walls normally filled with food photos, vacation Instagrams and Buzzfeed links, now overrun by posts condemning either Israel or Hamas, lamenting the fate of those in Gaza or defending the actions of Israel. The media noted the phenomenon, as did more than one of my Facebook connections, some who admitted to "defriending" friends over the online conflict.

While many saw the explosion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Facebook walls as an unfortunate violation of social media norms, this political scientist - and perhaps others like me who advocate for more citizen engagement - was heartened. Yes, I'm sure many of the posts "crossed lines" and it is never a good thing to lose a friend (over something like politics), but when you live in a society where people disagree strongly over important issues, nothing is better for democracy than a healthy debate.

That last statement is, of course, debatable. Those who study citizen deliberation - as will be unsurprising to anyone who's ever had a political discussion themselves - note that there are many potential downsides to "cross-cutting" dialogue. Instead of leading to better understanding, people engaged in political debate may just become more entrenched in their views. That's because we all share a pair of biases - confirmation and disconfirmation - which incline us to zero in on information that supports our views and swiftly discount information that challenges thems. More worrisome is the risk that comes when "lines are crossed" - that is, when debate becomes uglified by off-color comments, ad hominem attacks or other forms of nastiness. That's when friends get lost and, worse, people become convinced that those who disagree with them not only see the world differently but are some shade of "bad people."

But even though debate comes with considerable risks, we starry-eyed (small d) democrats have got to believe that the risks are outweighed by the benefits. For one, when we're silent about our views we have no chance of exposing others to different perspectives (and being exposed ourselves). (This is especially true today as we can become increasingly selective in our media choices.) While ignorance is arguably bliss on most topics, it can be dangerous when important issues are on the line. And even if we don't gain greater understanding of an issue through debate with our friends, there is a good chance that we'll appreciate other perspectives just by virtue of our friends holding them. This is the great hope of dialogue - that, at least when individuals share their views civilly (ie, avoiding nastiness), it's hard for rifts not to be somewhat narrowed (if rarely totally mended).

Whether the current Gaza-Israel Facebook battle results in a widening or narrowing of the divide between both sides - that is, whether the forces of repulsion or attraction win out in this case - is a matter of guess work. But maybe in some future of data-analysis wizardry we can test to see.

research finds

... from a trawl through 2013 research papers posted by Kevin Lewis:

• Messing with people's default categories of groups can promote tolerance.
• Having a sense of the meaning of life only helps you if it's stable over time.
• Explaining the decrease in human violence - since the dawn of history.
• Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the exceptions: forcing democracy rarely works.
• The price of voting, according to some economists, is about $10-$15. (Stefano Dellavigna et al)
• When politicians agree, it's not necessarily good for us. (Keena Lipsitz)
• One of the reasons citizens don't bother to vote may be because they know their representatives can't do much. (Ryan Carlin)
• An increasingly polarized media may be polarizing the most politically involved, but not the rest of us. (Markus Prior)
• ... And that may be because most of us tune out the polarized media. (Kevin Arcenaux et al)

words and phrases that need to be expunged from the English language...

... for meaning the opposite of themselves:

• Sanction
• Dig
• Inflammable

... for being overused and/or silly

• without further ado
• much ink has been spilled

the value of your social network

It's no longer prospective employers and online daters checking you out on Facebook.