
Information gerrymandering in social networks skews collective decision-making - hunglee2
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02562-z
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awinter-py
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

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amelius
> because people don't coordinate IRL or in blocks

Isn't that true?

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simplecomplex
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....

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cbhl
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](https://doi.org/10.1080/01439688800260171)

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

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sjg007
Tweets

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ConradKilroy
Interesting concept, "information/social gerrymandering"

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

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monza123
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](https://www.springchatapp.com)

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

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caseysoftware
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-...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-
our-thoughts)

