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

by Adam Kucharski

Young minds arrived from around the world, with Oppenheimer wanting to encourage the global flow of ideas. ‘The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person,’ as he put it.

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

Most of the websites looked incredibly amateurish, the sort of thing a beginner would put together. But digging behind the scenes, Albright found that they concealed extremely sophisticated tracking tools. The websites were collecting detailed data on personal identity, browsing behaviour, even mouse movements. That allowed them to follow susceptible users, feeding them even more extreme content. It wasn’t what users could see that made these websites so influential; it was the data harvesting that they couldn’t.83