It has been an interesting couple of days at my new academic home, the University of Alabama. As is the case with the initial time period around many incidents involving the safety of large numbers of people, the facts are a little unclear. According to school officials and local police, here is what happened: someone posted a threatening comment on a University of Alabama sorority's YouTube video. The threat was specific, referencing a time in the near future and a place on campus, and a threat of harm to large numbers of people. Additionally, at least one student reported, and later retracted, a statement about being attacked off-campus. Very soon after, school officials worked with police and determined that there was no threat to our students' safety beyond the YouTube comment, that it appeared as though no actual person was planning on carrying out any attack. This information did not have the intended effect of calming and reassuring everyone that it was okay to go about our regular business. As misinformation spread, it prompted many of our students and their parents to be fearful, so fearful that the students did not feel comfortable coming to class, which disrupted what, ostensibly, we're here to do: learn stuff in class.
The fears were based in part on real-life events. There was, apparently, a rumor that someone was dressed as the Joker on sorority row, which relates to the shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater in 2012. They were also based on something resembling an urban legend. A student of mine quoted a message he had seen that was circulating, citing it as part of the reason he was electing to stay home: "The name of the person who posted the comment on the sorority video, Arthur Pendragon, is the name of the main character in a book who went and killed a bunch of people on the fall equinox, which is tonight at 9:30...That is an actual person and he calls himself King Arthur because he believes he is the reincarnated King Arthur from hundreds of years ago and holds a celebration every fall equinox."
One question immediately occurred to me as all this was happening (or not happening): what was the role of social media in this occurrence of mass fear (or, if you like, fear contagion?)?
Did social media cause the mass fear?
In trying to answer this question, I try to maintain the stance of a skeptic: just because social media was involved in the event at various stages does not mean that it caused the event, or necessarily caused it to occur in a certain way. Social media could simply be standing in for face-to-face or other existing forms of communication (phone, television, radio, etc.). The underlying psychological mechanisms associated with our tendency to believe scary information that may not be true clearly pre-dates social media. Even the hint of the occurrence of a low-frequency/high-severity event is enough to set parts of our brains into overdrive (as it happens, those parts have been around for a very long time, before humans evolved). Tightly-knit groups of young people in particular were likely always especially susceptible to this kind of rumor. Thirty years ago, before social media, you could call in a bomb threat and freak out a campus. So maybe this isn't anything new.
On the other hand, perhaps some unique attributes of social media interact with those underlying psychological mechanisms in a way that brings about a new outcome that would not have existed without social media. So here is a consideration of how social media might have facilitated mass fear.
Social media as inciter
The initial threat was delivered via social media. Perhaps the person issuing the threat believed he could do so anonymously, achieving the desired goal of sewing fear in the community without getting caught. This is certainly true of lower-scale harm, such as bullying. As of now, you can (unfortunately) use the anonymity provided by social media to harass or bully another person but not get caught in the act. But once the stakes get high enough (e.g., terrorist threats), we suddenly see that even those posting anonymously can be tracked down. The person posting may not have known this to be the case. They may have believed that they could do this (because they hated the school, because they were bored, because they wanted to get out of an exam that day, who knows) and thought they could get away with it.
Social media also provides a kind of remove or abstraction that perhaps makes it easier to commit harmful or disruptive acts without considering the consequences. Even if the social media user can never be truly anonymous, not having to see the face, hear the voice, or be in physical proximity to the individuals they are harming or the lives they are disrupting likely makes it easier to do so.
Social media as effective propagator of misinformation
When you discuss a rumor with someone face-to-face, you can spread misinformation to one other person. When you post about it, you are spreading it to a larger group of people, potentially. I say "potentially" because while the potential audience for any given post is all Internet users (and, if it's picked up by the mainstream media, all users of TVs or radios), in practice, most posts are either ignored or seen by very few people. However, in events of great interest like this, each post becomes part of a whole. When people search for a specific term (e.g., University of Alabama incident), each person's post about the topic gets added to the tally. Ten people posting about a topic doesn't make it seem worth paying attention to, but if a million people post about it, even if it doesn't have much evidence substantiating it, it gets more attention which may lead it to spread more easily. When they are included in search counts and taken out of context, even reasonable social media posts (or de-bunking social media posts that attempt to correct misinformation) can inadvertently contribute to the stoking of mass fear.
Even if relatively few people post misinformation, if those people make up a substantial number of a given community (e.g., most people in your sorority, or most people in your Facebook feed), you're likely to believe that whatever they are talking about is worth paying attention to, regardless of how true it is.
It is also very easy to post misinformation on social media; easier, I would argue, than talking to another person face-to-face. For most of our students, social media is always available. Many of them are in the habit of posting their thoughts and feelings frequently.
It is also easier for misinformation to spread this way. Linking to other information sources is an integral part of the affordances and norms involved in all Internet use. Unfortunately, citing the sources of information (and the sources of those sources, until you get to a primary source) is not. One wonders whether this lack of substantiation will persist after we go through more and more of these episodes. It certainly doesn't have to. Theoretically, I'd imagine you could design a quick and simple way to track the flow of each bit of information from link to link to link, back to an original source. Those bibliographies that were so annoying to format may be more useful than we thought!
Social media as abettor of flawed reasoning
This came to mind as I tried to make sense of the fact that there were multiple alarming events reported across a period of 48 hours. People tend to see patterns, connections, and stories in human behavior even when they are not really there. This is likely especially true of people who are in a state of fear. At some point, people's flawed reasoning would run into counter-evidence that would suggest that the perceived connection among these events isn't really there. It occurs to me that in most cases, that counter-evidence comes to us from authorities: police or officials. Often, the messages from those authorities are mediated in some way, coming to us through mainstream media channels (e.g., television news). Which brings me to the next consideration of the role of social media in stoking mass fear.
Social media as a perceived unfiltered alternative to mass media narratives
I've been thinking more and more about the importance of trust in modern life. Our fates are connected to one another in a million ways we tend to ignore. Most of us assume that our packaged food is safe to eat, that our cars are safe to drive, that our votes will be counted when electing a political candidate. But do we trust authorities to tell us about threats to our safety? Some events have given us reason not to.
Under oppressive regimes, the authorities tells one story through government-controlled mass media while social media tells another story, a story "from the ground". We know that the authorities have an incentive and an ability to deceive, so we might be more likely to believe the social media narrative. The social media narrative also comes not just from one source but from many individuals, so it would seem that it would be less likely to be corrupted or biased. This ignores the fact that those posting on social media may have their own agendas, and though they may be posting uncensored pictures or facts about what is going on in the world, they may be purposely (or unconsciously) ignoring other images or facts. Thus, social media may only appear to be a less biased place to get unvarnished information about the world.
Social media narratives have the advantage of being more difficult to repress or control, but they have the disadvantage of not having a reputation. When the social media mob gets things wrong, the reputations of each individual posting and forwarding messages do not suffer in the way that the reputations of mainstream news organizations (or authorities like the police) do if they get things wrong. Social media can respond quicker to events and spread rumors because there is less of a price to pay if the information turns out not to be true.
This, of course, doesn't matter much if you don't trust information from authorities or the mainstream media. There was likely always some distrust of such official narratives, but there weren't many alternatives besides the odd underground newsletter or the person ranting and raving on the street corner. Social media fills this void. It presents people already predisposed to distrust official narratives with a seemingly trust-worthy ("unvarnished, unbiased") alternative.
In the case of the events (or non-events) at the University of Alabama, I wonder about students' trust in messages from authorities and their trust in messages from social media. Their trust in social media messages may not reflect an ignorance or unawareness of information from reliable sources, but a cynicism about just how reliable those mainstream sources are.
There are many important questions which will be answered in different ways by mainstream and social media sources: How many people really are dying from Ebola? How big of a threat is ISIS, really? Who we believe is, in part, a reflection of who we trust.
Teachable moments
In the end, I hope things settle down quickly so our students, all of our students, will come back to class. I'm already thinking about how we can turn this into a productive discussion about where we get information from, what sources we trust, and how we all might do things differently next time.
