The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society. This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence. This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation. It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation. The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion. These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media.

No abstract

The basic observation that we explore in this paper is simple but, we argue, rich in consequences: societal systems combine two qualities that are commonly referred to as complexity and complicatedness. We address the problem that societal systems remain recalcitrant despite the development of powerful approaches for dealing with both of these qualities. The root of this problem we identify to be that the combination between complexity and complicatedness is emergent; i.e. fundamentally and irreducibly different from either quality in isolation. This means that neither class of such approaches can be expected to work well on their own. But it also means that the obvious strategy of combining theory for complexity and complicatedness may be much more challenging than envisioned. In short, systems where complexity and complicatedness is mixed ought to be treated as a distinct class of systems. Noting a connection to what has long been called "wicked problems" we hereby outline such a class of systems that we call "wicked systems". We introduce a simple model and heuristic and discuss some implications for theorizing and modeling.

In this article we present an analysis of the discursive connections between Islamophobia and anti-feminism on a large Internet forum. We argue that the incipient shift from traditional media toward user-driven social media brings with it new media dynamics, relocating the (re)production of societal discourses and power structures and thus bringing about new ways in which discursive power is exercised. This clearly motivates the need to critically engage this field. Our research is based on the analysis of a corpus consisting of over 50 million posts, collected from the forum using custom web crawlers. In order to approach this vast material of unstructured text, we suggest a novel methodological synergy combining critical discourse analysis (CDA) and topic modeling -a type of statistical model for the automated categorization of large quantities of texts developed in computer science. By rendering an overview or 'content map' of the corpus, topic modeling provides an enriching complement to CDA, aiding discovery and adding analytical rigor.

Despite remarkable empirical and methodological advances, our theoretical understanding of the evolutionary processes that made us human remains fragmented and contentious. Here, we make the radical proposition that the cultural communities within which Homo emerged may be understood as a novel exotic form of organism. The argument begins from a deep congruence between robust features of Pan community life cycles and protocell models of the origins of life. We argue that if a cultural tradition, meeting certain requirements, arises in the context of such a "social protocell," the outcome will be an evolutionary transition in individuality whereby traditions and hominins coalesce into a macroscopic bio-socio-technical system, with an organismal organization that is culturally inherited through irreversible fission events on the community level. We refer to the resulting hypothetical evolutionary individual as a "sociont." The social protocell provides a preadapted source of alignment of fitness interests that addresses a number of open questions about the origins of shared adaptive cultural organization, and the derived genetic (and highly unusual) adaptations that support them. Also, social cooperation between hominins is no longer in exclusive focus since cooperation among traditions becomes salient in this model. This provides novel avenues for explanation. We go on to hypothesize that the fate of the hominin in such a setting would be mutualistic coadaptation into a part-whole relation with the sociont, and we propose that the unusual suite of derived features in Homo is consistent with this hypothesis.