The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

by Adam Kucharski

Rewarding success based on a simple performance metric creates a feedback loop: people start chasing the metric rather than the underlying quality it is trying to assess.

Relying on measurements like clicks or likes can give a misleading impression of how people are truly behaving.

A few of the new members donated and recruited others, but most did nothing. Of the people who joined, only 28 per cent recruited someone else, and a mere 0.2 per cent donated.[76]

Evidently, many of us are happier to share something than to read it.

‘The behaviour we’re talking about is whether your friends like or comment on the post.’ Because people don’t have to put much effort into performing such actions, it’s much easier to get them to act. ‘It’s a light touch nudge for an easy to accomplish, low-cost behaviour.’

Marketers face a similar task when designing a campaign.

The difference, of course, is that whereas health agencies spend money to block the crucial paths of transmission, advertising agencies put money into expanding them.

When we click on a website link, we often become the subject of a high-speed bidding war. Within about 0.03 seconds, the website server will gather all the information they have about us and send it to its ad provider. The provider then shows this information to a group of automated traders acting on behalf of advertisers. After another 0.07 seconds, the traders will have bid for the right to show us an advert. The ad provider selects the winning bid and sends the advert to our browser, which slots the advert into the webpage as it loads on the screen.[81]

Notifications are a particularly powerful way of keeping us engaged. The average iPhone user unlocks their phone over eighty times a day.[88]

The more we interact with the app, the more we need to keep interacting. ‘It’s a social-validation feedback loop,’ as Sean Parker put it. ‘It’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.’[89]

There are several other design features that keep us viewing and sharing content. In 2010, Facebook introduced ‘infinite scrolling’, removing the distraction of having to change page.

Social media design is also centred on sharing; it’s difficult for us to post content without seeing what others are up to.

Roberts would later divide online censorship strategies into what she calls the ‘three Fs’: flooding, fear, and friction. By flooding online platforms with the opposing views, censors can drown out other messages. The threat of repercussions for rule breaking leads to fear. And removing or blocking content creates friction by slowing down access to information.[93]

They looked at who had typed comments on the platform but never posted them. The research team noted that the contents of the posts weren’t sent back to Facebook’s servers, just a record of whether someone had started typing.

Londoners Charlotte Goodman and Yara Rodrigues Fowler had wanted to encourage their fellow twenty-somethings to vote for Labour, so designed a chatbot to reach a wide audience.

Bots make it possible to have a vast number of interactions at the same time. With a linked network of bots, people can perform actions at a scale that simply wouldn’t be feasible if a human had to do it all manually. These botnets can consist of thousands, if not millions of accounts. Like human users, these bots can post content, start conversations, and promote ideas.

Vast numbers of people in the UK, and then vast numbers in the US, had been duped by fake stories posted by bots and other questionable accounts.