What we can do, though, is try and make media outlets, political organisations, and social media platforms – not to mention ourselves – more resistant to manipulation. To start with, that means having a much better understanding of the transmission process. It’s not enough to concentrate on a few groups, or countries, or platforms. Like disease outbreaks, information rarely respects boundaries. Just as the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ was blamed on Spain because it was the only country reporting cases, our picture of online contagion can be skewed by where we see outbreaks. In recent years, researchers have published almost five times more studies looking at contagion on Twitter than on Facebook, despite the latter having seven times more users.[125] This is because, historically, it’s been much easier for researchers to access public Twitter data than to see what’s spreading on closed apps like Facebook or WhatsApp.
There’s hope the situation could change – in 2019, Facebook announced it was partnering with twelve teams of academics to study the platform’s effect on democracy – but we still have a long way to go to understand the wider information ecosystem.[126] One of the reasons online contagion is so hard to investigate is that it’s been difficult for most of us to see what other people are actually exposed to. A couple of decades ago, if we wanted to see what campaigns were out there, we could pick up a newspaper or turn on our televisions. The messages themselves were visible, even if their impact was unclear. In outbreak terms, everyone could see the sources of infection, but nobody really understood how much transmission was happening, or which infection came from which source. Contrast this with the rise of social media, and manipulation campaigns that follow specific users around the internet. When it comes to spreading ideas, groups seeding information in recent years have had a much better idea about the paths of transmission, but the sources of infection have been invisible to everyone else.[127]
Uncovering and measuring the spread of misinformation and disinformation will be crucial if we want to design effective counter-measures. Without a good understanding of contagion, there’s a risk of either blaming the wrong source, ‘bad air’-style, or proposing simplistic strategies like abstinence, which – as with STI prevention – might work in theory but not in practice. By accounting for the transmission process, we’ll have a better chance of avoiding epidemiological errors like these.
We’ll also be able to take advantage of knock-on benefits. When something is contagious, a control measure will have both a direct and indirect effect. Think about vaccination. Vaccinating someone has a direct effect because they now won’t get infected; it also has an indirect effect because they won’t pass an infection on to others. When we vaccinate a population, we therefore benefit from both the direct and indirect effects.
The same is true of online contagion. Tackling harmful content will have a direct effect – preventing a person from seeing it – as well as an indirect effect, preventing them spreading it to others. This means well-designed measures may prove disproportionately effective. A small drop in the reproduction number can lead to a big reduction in the size of an outbreak.
‘Is spending time on social media bad for us?’ asked two Facebook researchers in late 2017. David Ginsburg and Moira Burke had weighed up the evidence about how social media use affects wellbeing. The results, published by Facebook, suggested that not all interactions were beneficial. For example, Burke’s research had previously found that receiving genuine messages from close friends seemed to improve users’ wellbeing, but receiving casual feedback – such as likes – did not. ‘Just like in person, interacting with people you care about can be beneficial,’ Ginsburg and Burke suggested, ‘while simply watching others from the sidelines may make you feel worse.’[128]
The ability to test common theories about human behaviour is a big advantage of online studies. In the past decade or so, researchers have used massive datasets to question long-standing ideas about the spread of information. This research has already challenged misconceptions about online influence, popularity, and success. It’s even overturned the very concept of something ‘going viral’. Online methods are also finding their way back into disease analysis; by adapting techniques used to study online memes, malaria researchers have found new ways to track the spread of disease in Central America.[129]
Social media might be the most prominent way our interactions have changed, but it’s not the only network that’s been growing in our lives. As we shall see in the next chapter, technological connections are expanding in other ways, with new links permeating through our daily routines. Such technology can be hugely beneficial, but it can also create new risks. In the world of outbreaks, every new connection is a potential new route of contagion.
6
How to own the internet
When a major cyber-attack took down websites including Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter, the attackers included kettles, fridges, and toasters. During 2016, a piece of software called ‘Mirai’ had infected thousands of smart household devices worldwide. These items increasingly allow users to control things like temperature via online apps, creating connections that are vulnerable to infection. Once infected with Mirai, the devices had formed a vast network of bots, creating a powerful online weapon.[1]
On 21 October that year, the world discovered that the weapon had been fired. The hackers behind the botnet had chosen to target Dyn, a popular domain name system. These systems are crucial for navigating the web. They convert familiar web addresses – like Amazon.com – into a numeric IP address that tells your computer where to find the site on the web. Think of it like a phonebook for websites. The Mirai bots attacked Dyn by flooding it with unnecessary requests, bringing the system to a halt. Because Dyn provides details for several high profile websites, it
