How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds

A growing body of research suggests that human behavior on social media — coordinated activism, information cascades, harassment mobs — bears striking similarity to this kind of so-called “emergent behavior” in nature: occasions when organisms like birds or fish or ants act as a cohesive unit, without hierarchical direction from a designated leader

We tend to think of what we see cascading across the network — the substance, the specific claims — as the problem. Much of it is old phenomena manifesting in new ways: rumors, harassment mobs, disinformation, propaganda. But it carries new consequences, in large part because of the size and speed of networks across which it moves. In the 1910s, a

We are treating the worst dynamics of today’s online ecosystem as  problems of speech  in the new technological environment, rather than challenges of curation and network organization.

Second, we must move beyond thinking of platform content moderation policies as “the solution” and prioritize rethinking design. Policy establishes guardrails and provides justification to disrupt certain information cascades, but does so reactively and, presently, based on the message substance. Although policy shapes propagation, it does so

Biology has a word for this undulating dance: “murmuration.” In a murmuration, each bird sees, on average, the seven birds nearest it and adjusts its own behavior in response. If its nearest neighbors move left, the bird usually moves left. If they move right, the bird usually moves right. The bird does not know the flock’s ultimate desti

The  system , the  infrastructure itself , shaped society, which shaped behavior, which shaped society. The programming — the substance, the content — was somewhat secondary. 

This overfocus on the substance — misinformation, disinformation, propaganda — and the fight over content moderation (and regulatory remedies like revising Section 230) makes us miss opportunities to examine the structure — and, in turn, to address the polarization, factional behavior and harmful dynamics that it sows.