Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making | Hacker News Reader

Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making

nature.com

92 pointshunglee211 comments

Saw an interview a few years ago with madeleine albright where she was asked 'aren't you excited by how social media is increasing political participation' and she used the phrase 'disaggregation of voices' to say 'not really'.

If I understood correctly, she thinks that mass social platforms provide the illusion of participation because you're speaking up, but because people don't coordinate IRL or in blocks, they end up having zero impact. It removes the necessary hierarchy for movements to make decisions and wield power.

Also cannot believe they picked orange for one of the sides, that's hilarious

> because people don't coordinate IRL or in blocks

Isn't that true?

The great thing about game theory is it’s whatever you want it to be!

“In Stewart and colleagues’ model, gridlock is assumed to be both likely and undesirable. It is unclear whether these assumptions apply in larger-scale decision processes such as national elections — in which gridlock is either extremely unlikely or impossible. ”

So the entire theory is based on something that we observe does not happen and has no corollary in realty (voter gridlock) Okay....

I was under the impression that in the past, viewers and readers tended to self-select for television, radio, and newspapers that match the opinions they wanted to read. "Old media" had editorial decisions and tone that affected collective decision-making.

"A small number of zealots ... bias vote outcomes" sounds uncannily like the narrative in the song "Non-Stop" from Hamilton (spoiler: "he wrote the other fifty-one" essays). So do social networks make this effect bigger? Smaller? Allow it to happen internationally?

That is not to say that a new medium has no impact on collective decision-making -- there are papers describing how the radio led Americans to elect people that sounded good, and the television led Americans to elect people that looked good. https://doi.org/10.1080/01439688800260171

I wonder when we'll start to see candidates that get elected because they're really likable on Slack.

Tweets

In the early Republic, parties set up and subsidized newspapers. During the last century, before broadcast media started eliminating newspapers, it was common for big cities to have a morning and an evening paper. Businessmen and professionals read the morning paper before going to in to the office, factory workers read the evening paper on coming home. Of course the morning paper was conservative and the evening paper was liberal.

Interesting concept, "information/social gerrymandering"

It is a quite scary concept, effectively a kind of instrumentalization of the filter bubble.

Found this incredibly interesting. The concepts really strongly overlaps with a social media startup last week that I discovered which is trying to tackle the same kind of issue. https://www.springchatapp.com

It will be interesting to see how they deal with info gerrymandering in their smaller chatroom concept.

Not just applicable to social networks either. Search results can and do swing things too:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

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