Limits of social mobilization

Abstract

The Internet and social media have enabled the mobilization of large crowds to achieve time-critical feats, ranging from mapping crises in real time, to organizing mass rallies, to conducting searchand-rescue operations over large geographies. Despite significant success, selection bias may lead to inflated expectations of the efficacy of social mobilization for these tasks. What are the limits of social mobilization, and how reliable is it in operating at these limits? We build on recent results on the spatiotemporal structure of social and information networks to elucidate the constraints they pose on social mobilization. We use the DARPA Network Challenge as our working scenario, in which social media were used to locate 10 balloons across the United States. We conduct high-resolution simulations for referral-based crowdsourcing and obtain a statistical characterization of the population recruited, geography covered, and time to completion. Our results demonstrate that the outcome is plausible without the presence of mass media but lies at the limit of what time-critical social mobilization can achieve. Success relies critically on highly connected individuals willing to mobilize people in distant locations, overcoming the local trapping of diffusion in highly dense areas. However, even under these highly favorable conditions, the risk of unsuccessful search remains significant. These findings have implications for the design of better incentive schemes for social mobilization. They also call for caution in estimating the reliability of this capability.social networks | human dynamics

Crowdsourcing medical expertise in near real time

“…We used a tiered enrollment design, sending invitations to potential participants in 3 phases to study the relationship between the size of the HCP crowd and sustained use as reported in other social networks. 13 Using a cutoff of >3 visits per week to demarcate active periods of use, we saw during the initial phase of enrollment that 20 providers generated a total of 170 visits over 22 days (Figure 2A). The addition of 28 members (phase II, n 5 48 total) extended active use by 28 days, with a total of 476 page visits.…”

Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media

“…A subsequent study used high-resolution, data-driven simulations of recruitment dynamics to demonstrate that the outcome of the Red Balloon challenge is plausible without the presence of mass media, but lies at the limit of human capability, and requires all parameters to be at their empirical extremes (Rutherford et al 2013a). It also identified the role of population density and information overload in obscuring the target information.…”

Beyond viral

“…First, equating social mobilization with viral information propagation renders the phenomenon amenable to analysis using tools from epidemiology and public health. 9,24 However, this epidemiological perspective is only useful in a population with conducive socio-political incentives, that is, a society already "switched on." The second reason behind the emphasis on information virality is a phenomenon we may dub network measurability bias, which refers to the tendency to focus on processes that are easily observable within digital social networks (such as 'likes' and 're-tweets'), while neglecting key latent processes such as the ideological, cultural, and economic incentives of actors.…”