Murmuration
Noema came up with a nice article on murmuration. In essence, the concept goes like this. You see a bunch of starlings in the sky forming all sort of shapes in a chaotic orchestra. However chaotic it is, it is synchronized to the dot.
But, what happens there? Why does it work? It so happens that a bird doesn’t look at the whole flock and behave. It just looks at the 7 birds around it and adjusts it’s behaviour. In due course of time, we would see every bird will make the same moves and when one of the birds changes tune, the whole flock changes tune.
This concept is heavily brought into social trends. All you need to do is seed a trend and then, it will pick up as if in autopilot. What happens there? The social media platforms help you in “identifying friends” - there are multiple levels of it -
Your contacts whom you personally add
Those whose views you are in tune with and whom you personally add
System recommendations of those who are friends with your friends
Analysis of the above data to recommend psychometric friends - those who have the same views as yours
By the end of Step 3, you will be boxed into a like minded people who will keep you engaged for a longer time. After all, the more time you spend online, the more you can be targeted - both from the point of advertising and from the point of moulding your thought.
Now, can an advertiser buy your engagement(by replacing those from your ideological circle with his own ideas) to sell his product, or even worse, engineer a society(spread fake news, engineer a riot etc)? It’s equally possible. After all, it’s algorithmic and there is literally no way you can control that unless you are putting tabs on that specific kind of content.
This moulding your thought goes to the next level - social trends. It is nothing but a topic of hot discussion in your circles. By making you aware of the trends, there’s a fair chance that you will engage with the trend and help it spread further by joining the chain.
Is this information pushed into my timeline of any use to me, do they really care, or do they really know? Now, again, the same question - what’s the purpose of the trend? Is it innocuous or is it harmful and dangerous?