Social Media and Fear: A Case Study

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.

Terrorism and Contagious Media

There was a truly provocative blog post on the NYTimes' Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt. The blog entry solicited ideas on which terrorist attack would wreak the most havoc. Predictably, the article prompted both scathing rebukes and praise for its openness in roughly equal measure.

It got me to thinking about whether the scathing critiques had any merit. As I understand it, the worry of most of the naysayers was that either terrorists or unhinged people looking for ways to lash out at the world would get ideas from this blog and be more apt to try to carry those ideas out. It might be that they actually get a specific idea on how to cause the most fear, or it might be that just talking about terrorism in this manner puts it in the forefront of their minds and gets them to act out while not necessarily cribbing an actual idea from the website.

This is similar territory to that which I covered in my blog post-VA Tech. In both cases, we imagine an unhinged individual with nothing to live for who wants some sort of revenge on the rest of the world. He has this nebulous rage built up, but its unclear as to how it will be released. Maybe if he is presented with one set of stimuli (say, a lot of ultimate fighting videos and some death metal), he will train to become an ultimate fighter and beat the shit out of similarly frustrated young males. If he is presented with another set of stimuli (say, non-stop coverage of a mass murder or extensive, detailed speculation as to how to carry out a terrorist attack that would cause the most fear), then he might be more inclined to carry out such an act. A third set of stimuli might prompt him to merely kill himself, etc. With Virginia Tech, the worry seemed to be more emotional than logistic. The images of the gunman had a certain visceral power that offended people. In the case of today's NYTimes blog, its just words.

Many comments on the blog that fall into the pro-openness, pro-Levitt category take a "cat's out of the bag" approach to the potential harmfulness of information. This assumes that all nodes on the information network are equal. If a bit of information is on some obscure message board, then its liable to have the same effect on people's behavior as if it were on a higher-profile webpage. The linked nature of the internet means that if a bit of information is interesting, funny, or dangerous enough to warrant attention, it will get attention via digg, delicious, or the viral spread of blogs, vlogs, and emails.

Here's my problem with that reasoning as it applies here. What Levitt wrote isn't what might actually cause harm. He sketched out only one scenario. Its the aggregation of reader comments that could contain the terrorist scenarios that are superior to any that have been thought of before.

I've been waiting for the Wisdom of Crowds wiki-logic to hit the war on terror. By aggregating these scenarios, we seem to be doing the terrorists' work for them. It takes time, energy, and intellectual ability to think up plausible scenarios for terrorist attacks. One writer (e.g. Tom Clancy) could be pretty good at that, and a bunch of devoted terrorists could be just as good if not better, but a larger group of well-educated, creative people (if they worked collectively) would certainly be better at it than either Clancy or the terrorist. So I think you'd be mistaken to say that if we can come up with a bright idea for causing terror, it would've already been thought of. Even the most sophisticated think tank is probably no match for the collective wisdom of the NYTimes' readership (as I pat myself on the back).

Then there's this paradox: the people who think the information is harmful and comment accordingly are, in some sense, aiding and abetting the harmful information by making it more visible. In the inexorable logic of online community popularity, if a comment has many comments, it is more likely to be considered "important," to be forwarded, to be read. The virus spreads.

If indeed this discussion is followed by a large scale terrorist attack (or a few of them), we shouldn't assume that it caused it/them, nor should we fall back on the well worn truth that terrorism is extremely uncommon and therefore is nothing to worry about. Personally, I have never been hit by a car even once in my life. Does this mean that I shouldn't look both ways before crossing a street? We have lived in a world where Tom Clancy and other writers have dreamed up scenarios for terrorism, and one where groups of terrorists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking up ways to disrupt societies, but I don't think we've ever had an instance of a large number of creative, intelligent people brainstorming about ways to cause mass fear. In the sense that this is unprecedented, I think its impossible to definitively say whether or not this kind of openness is necessarily good.

But it could be good. The quicker we can think of potential problems, the quicker we can plan solutions. Dubner and Levitt have always been convinced that people are worried about the wrong things (handguns instead of swimming pools, for instance). There are those who believe that the threat of terrorism is way overblown and think that Levitt's exercise proves that by showing the disparity between possible scenarios (lots) and actual events (very, very few), we prove this. But I would say that we might learn what kinds of terrorism would be worth prepping for by discussing in this way. If we talk about it openly, we might discover that we should spend the money we're spending on airline safety on protecting the food and water supply or developing a well-known, well practiced quarantine protocol. Dubner and Levitt are all about correcting conventional wisdom when its out of whack, and this would seem to be an instance where they're needed.

You could also argue that by familiarizing us with possible doomsday scenarios, the article and the discussion makes eventual hysteria less likely. And really, that's what would cause a society to collapse: not the attack, but the ensuing hysteria. If we can convince potential attackers that we'll bounce right back from an attack (either b/c of our preparedness, our short attention span, or both), they'll be less likely to attack in the first place.

Hmm. Short attention spans...

So maybe its good that our attention spans have been whittled away by advertisements. This way, we can't stay scared for very long.

Aqua Teen Bomb Scare: The Other Story

There are really (at least) two stories to come out of last week's Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing bomb scare: one has to do with the over-reaction of the police and the media, and artists playing the mainstream press for the bunch of chumps that they are. The other is the conflict between the profit motive and the security motive. This second story may turn out to be the more lasting and significant one.
I find that story more compelling because it pits one side of the ideological split in the US against itself. Granted, I'm writing and reasoning broadly here, but its not too much of a stretch to say that conservative America is for unrestrained capitalism as well as strong homeland security. This is a more compelling conflict than ideological conflicts between conservative and liberal American cultures (say, the conflict between security and privacy). In those cases, there is no internal conflict. People are either one way or the other. The two groups essentially operate independent of one another, watching their own news, investing in their own funds or companies, socializing with like-minded people, and flirting with the idea of actual debate by watching a bit of FoxNews/The Daily Show to angry up their blood before returning to the safety of their own belief system. Its wrong to think of these two Americas as geographically separate. They're neighbors, co-workers, spouses, etc. But in terms of their philosophy, they feel neither the overwhelming need to convert the other side nor be converted themselves.

But let's say you're of the conservative persuasion. You own shares in a multi-national media conglomerate, and you'll be damned if Uncle Sam tries to regulate any aspect of said company's attempts to maximize profits. If this company you invested in needs to put wacky signs underneath bridges and in subways to reach that coveted 18-34 male demo, well then you'd better not prevent them from doing so. At the same time, you can't believe that these weirdo artists have put us all in grave danger (and are laughing about it!) by putting bomb-like devices underneath bridges. But sooner or later, these two forces - the profit motive and the security motive - will come into conflict. And now they have. In this particular case, you could argue that Turner Broadcasting isn't as right-wing as most corps, but as a corp, I'm sure it has a lot of gung-ho Republicans sitting on its board.

This conflicts between unrestrained capitalism and a government's attempts to keep the country on lock down are bound to butt up against one another as long as there is a strong conservative bend to the leadership in this country. This isn't to say that every ideology isn't without its inner conflicts. But, since this one has to do with the limits of advertising, I thought it was worth pointing out here.

24, the Terrorist Threat, and Err

First off, you have the image of Err giving the finger alongside stern faced officials, and Shepard Smith saying, “their god is an Indian…that turns into a wolf.” There’s something so absurd, so satiric about these images and sounds that its hard to move beyond them. But, for the sake of argument, let’s consider another facet of this event: the two people on trial at the center of this. They could be cast as tools of a multinational corporate advertising behemoth or as artists with ties to Boston’s beloved academic community.

Really, I can’t see the parent company (either Comedy Central or Turner Broadcasting) as an enemy in the court of public opinion. The two likely enemies are (if you’re on the right) the long-haired, smirking artists who don’t realize how serious the terrorist threat is and need to be taught a lesson or (if you’re on the left) the incompetent authority figures (police, govt) that are trying to outlaw art via the war on terror.

As in most cases, people’s existing beliefs determine their reaction. But, for a moment, I won’t be so jaded, and I’ll believe that there are some people who haven’t made up their minds and would consider new information. What information might we consider?

To start with, you’ve got an box-like object that looked to be about 2’x1’ that had wires and possibly duct tape on its exterior OR you’ve got a lite-brite. The debate hinges on this visual, which cannot help but advertise ATHF, and also is proof that even if there is visual evidence, those who are passionately disposed one way or the other will see two different objects: one sees a lite-brite, the other sees a box with wires and duct tape. One sees an object that has been there for 3 weeks and has appeared in many other cities in similar locations, another simply sees that it is under a major bridge where there may have been graffiti but no protruding objects or devices.

Its impossible to ask everyone at all times not to do anything that might look suspicious to someone else. You can reduce the odds of someone setting off a bomb in a city by asking people to report suspicious packages or behavior, but if people report too many false alarms, then it makes the city less safe. So the crux of this argument becomes: what constitutes suspicious behavior or packaging? What could a bomb look like? Where would it be placed?

Each of our individual beliefs on this matter has to do with how great a threat we believe terrorism to be. The government and various corporations have an incentive to exaggerate the threat, while other groups (artists, terrorists, libertarians) have an incentive to see less of a threat than the one that truly exists. Some people may acknowledge the threat, but may feel that the actions taken in this case reveal our inability to detect false positives, thereby revealing how vulnerable we are on a very public stage, thereby making us more vulnerable (especially when the authorities cannot admit they made a mistake because they don’t want to lose face).

Its interesting that people have been bringing up 24 on the blogs, suggesting that the show has some influence over our perception of a terrorist threat. Its good that people are beginning to acknowledge the effects of fictional media on our perception of reality. The next step might be that each of us spend more time gathering information about the relationships between large states and those fighting against large states using violent tactics throughout history (Israel and Ireland seem like good places to start), the technology typically employed by these people, basic human psychology, the nature of insurgent movements throughout history, global politics, and encourage others to do the same. This holistic approach towards gathering information seems like the only way to recalibrate our individual or collective perception of “suspicious” behavior or packaging.

Blogs and Comments: reacting to news (plus a few notes on controversial advertising)

Its just a few hours after a bomb scare here in Boston, one that happens to have a particularly absurd bend to it. Initially, I saw the images of traffic stopped and the bomb crews under bridges on TV, and reports that it was not a genuine threat but a hoax. Then a friend told me that he had heard on NPR that the "suspicious packages" that were causing all the hubbub were lite-brite images of Err. This sounded too ridiculous to be true, so I didn't really believe it until I got home and looked it up on the web. Most of the articles in online newspapers are of the same sort: simply reporting what happened, which is what I'd want from them. But I wanted more than that. I wanted opinions. I wasn't so much interested in the event as the public reaction to the event. Would it just blow over really quickly? Will most people side with the Mayor and the Governor against the network and the advertisers, or will most people side with Comedy Central et al?

Obviously, the sites that people comment and blog on are not representative of the public reaction, but in just 30 minutes, I was able to find a wide range of reactions to the events that brought up a lot of good points that I would've never thought of and that TV news probably wouldn't have broadcast (generally, TV just parrots the same facts over and over, or presents one highly-opinionated viewpoint): that the placement of the signs (under bridges) combined with the fact that if they were not lit up and viewed from a distance they wouldn't look like Err giving the finger as much as a box with wires sticking out of the back make the alarmist claims somewhat understandable; that Shepard Smith said, "their god is an indian...that turns into a wolf"; that Bill O'Reilly suggested that a cartoon character be arrested; that the signs had been there for 3 weeks, etc.

You have to sift through a lot of erroneous, opinionated information while trolling blogs, but when something like this happens, they're more satisfying than traditional media simply because they moves faster. That's what I came to realize: the pace of information on blogs. This makes me all the more interested in blog or comment filtering (a la digg's system of making the most-recent, most-read, most-approved comments more visible than the others). Or perhaps the thing to do is find a community of bloggers or commenters that you've come to trust and go to those sites when big events happen. I'd guess that its this sped-up information that is largely responsible for the shortening of the news cycle. Cable news and legit press are just trying to keep up.

This event could also be proof of the point I made in a previous post about the unintended effects of advertising. There's no doubt that this particular situation had more to do with poor judgment on the part of the police and government than it does with advertising, but it does bring up an interesting point about the limits of advertising. Although, if this does, in fact, create buzz for the film (which it almost certainly will), and thereby generate more revenue for the parent company, then this would be considered effective advertising, and therefore should be mimicked in the future, no? It will be incredibly difficult to draw correlations between the profitability of the Aqua Teen franchise and this controversy. But as much as this might drive up their revenue, its an impossible thing to plan or duplicate. I'd argue that its precisely the perceived unintended nature of the publicity that makes it appealing to consumers. They're drawn to the product only b/c they believe the ad agency and the network when they say "we had no idea this would happen." And really, buying something related to Aqua Teen at this point (say, an Err shirt) isn't so much a vote for headline-grabbing controversy and police-bating as much as an assertion that the police, homeland security, and the FBI need to handle potential terrorist threats in a different manner.