Exponential Information
Facebook and Twitter have no friends. Poor Mark and Jack have earned the ire of both Democrats and Republicans, who seem to hate the two social media companies in equal measure. If there is one thing our divided country can agree on, it’s that social media companies must be made scapegoats.
Exactly what should be done about social media is a question that touches on antitrust law, national security, and much more. But at their cores, these companies are just tools for publishing and sharing information. The right question to ask is how well do they perform as purveyors of information?
The commentariat over simplify the matter, labeling bits of information pulled from social media servers as either true or false, good or evil. But a serious analysis must measure the value of that information, in other words, how informative or impactful that information, say a news story, is. In fact, we must go beyond a binary, subjective analysis of factualness to examine the other attributes that make a story valuable. One of these is timeliness.
In an article titled Defining Information, Ben Thompson founder of Stratechery, observes that social media rapidly surfaces “emergent information,” information that isn’t yet widely known.[1] Social media closes the gap between when an event happens and when the rest of us hear about it. People who are close to an event or have rare insight learn of it first and become super spreaders. Thanks to social media, we get information sooner.
It’s trivially obvious that given the choice, we’d prefer to have the same piece of information earlier rather than later. But how much does timing really matter? Well, in the case of an exponentially spreading virus, it turns out, a lot. Such is the case when you shrink the base in an exponential system.
In the early days of the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party kept its people and the rest of the world from getting the facts. To make matters worse, experts at the WHO, CDC, and legacy media outlets downplayed the threat of the virus. Even in the face of common sense, they promulgated misinformation, like the long-debunked claim that masks don’t work. [2]
But, despite the misdirection of the CCP and gullible complicity of the American political and media establishment, some Americans caught on and used social media to counter the prevailing narrative. Many even took it upon themselves to wear masks and socially distance before the government even admitted we were facing a pandemic. As Thompson points out in another Stratechery article titled Zero Trust Information, scientists at a little-known Seattle lab knew as early as March 1st that the virus had been spreading in America. They did what many of us would do and posted their findings on Twitter and, he writes, “you can draw a direct line from this tweet thread to widespread social distancing, particularly on the West Coast.”[3]
When would the alarm have been sounded in the absence of social media? The evidence is clear: much, much later. Sure, most of us didn’t see the experts from the Seattle lab tweet their warnings because we don’t follow the “right” people. But their followers did, and each of them spread the news to n more people. Soon thereafter, to put it crudely, people in the Hacker News part of the country were quarantining, while those of us in YT territory were still echoing the CDC.
Few would argue that America handled the pandemic particularly well, but social media empowered a small but important subset of America, and this had a disproportionately positive effect. We live in a complex world that is in thrall to wave after wave of exponentially growing and decaying black swans. While they may give us a sense of security in coherence, the siloed and stultified systems of the past are useless. Only exponential systems suffice to combat exponential threats.
[1] https://stratechery.com/2020/defining-information/
[2] https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/13319/face-masks-considerably-reduce-covid-19-cases-in-germany-a-synthetic-control-method-approach
