95. Author interview with Melissa Tracy, August 2018.
96. Lowrey A., ‘True Crime Costs’, Slate, 21 October 2010.
5. Going viral
1. Background on Buzzfeed from: Peretti J., ‘My Nike Media Adventure’, The Nation, 9 April 2001; Email correspondence with customer service representatives at Nike iD. http://www.yorku.ca/dzwick/niked.html Accessed: January 2018; Salmon F., ‘BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti Goes Long’, Fusion, 11 June 2014; Lagorio-Chafkin C., ‘The Humble Origins of Buzzfeed’, Inc., 3 March 2014; Rice A., ‘Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret?’, New York Magazine, 7 April 2013.
2. Peretti J., ‘My Nike Media Adventure’, The Nation, 9 April 2001.
3. Background and quotes from author interview with Duncan Watts, February 2018. There is also a more detailed discussion of this research in: Watts D., Everything is Obvious: Why Common Sense is Nonsense (Atlantic Books, 2011).
4. Milgram S., ‘The small-world problem’, Psychology Today, 1967.
5. Dodds P.S. et al., ‘An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks’, Science, 2003.
6. Bakshy E. et al., ‘Everyone’s an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter’, Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM’11), 2011.
7. Aral S. and Walker D., ‘Identifying Influential and Susceptible Members of Social Networks’, Science, 2012.
8. Aral S. and Dillon P., ‘Social influence maximization under empirical influence models’, Nature Human Behaviour, 2018.
9. Data from: Ugander J. et al., ‘The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph’, arXiv, 2011; Kim D.A. et al., ‘Social network targeting to maximise population behaviour change: a cluster randomised controlled trial’, The Lancet, 2015; Newman M.E., ‘Assortative mixing in networks’, Physical Review Letters, 2002; Apicella C.L. et al., ‘Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers’, Nature, 2012.
10. Conclusion supported by: Aral S. and Dillon P., Nature Human Behaviour, 2018; Bakshy E. et al., WSDM, 2011; Kim D.A. et al., The Lancet, 2015.
11. Buckee C.O.F. et al., ‘The effects of host contact network structure on pathogen diversity and strain structure’, PNAS, 2004; Kucharski A., ‘Study epidemiology of fake news’, Nature, 2016.
12. Bessi A. et al., ‘Science vs Conspiracy: Collective Narratives in the Age of Misinformation’, PLOS ONE, 2015; Garimella K. et al., ‘Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship’, Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference 2018, 2018.
13. Background from: Goldacre B., Bad Science (Fourth Estate, 2008); The Editors of The Lancet, ‘Retraction – Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children’, The Lancet, 2010.
14. Finnegan G., ‘Rise in vaccine hesitancy related to pursuit of purity’, Horizon Magazine, 26 April 2018; Larson H.J., ‘Maternal immunization: The new “normal” (or it should be)’, Vaccine, 2015; Larson H.J. et al., ‘Tracking the global spread of vaccine sentiments: The global response to Japan’s suspension of its HPV vaccine recommendation’, Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 2014.
15. Background on variolation from: ‘Variolation – an overview’, ScienceDirect Topics, 2018.
16. Voltaire., ‘Letter XI’ from Letters on the English. (1734).
17. Background on Bernoulli’s work from: Dietz K. and Heesterbeek J.A.P., ‘Daniel Bernoulli’s epidemiological model revisited’, Mathematical Biosciences, 2002; Colombo C. and Diamanti M., ‘The smallpox vaccine: the dispute between Bernoulli and d’Alembert and the calculus of probabilities’, Lettera Matematica International, 2015.
18. There is a large literature on MMR and measles vaccine safety and efficacy, e.g. Smeeth L. et al., ‘MMR vaccination and pervasive developmental disorders: a case-control study’, The Lancet, 2004; A. Hviid, J.V. Hansen, M. Frisch, et al., ‘Measles, Mumps, Rubella Vaccination and Autism: A Nationwide Cohort Study’, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019; LeBaron C.W. et al., ‘Persistence of Measles Antibodies After 2 Doses of Measles Vaccine in a Postelimination Environment’, JAMA Pediatrics, 2007.
19. Wellcome Global Monitor 2018, 19 June 2019.
20. Finnegan G., ‘Rise in vaccine hesitancy related to pursuit of purity’, Horizon Magazine, 26 April 2018.
21. Funk S. et al., ‘Combining serological and contact data to derive target immunity levels for achieving and maintaining measles elimination’, BioRxiv, 2019.
22. ‘Measles: Europe sees record number of cases and 37 deaths so far this year’, British Medical Journal, 2018.
23. Bakshy E. et al., ‘Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook’, Science, 2015; Tufekci Z., ‘How Facebook’s Algorithm Suppresses Content Diversity (Modestly) and How the Newsfeed Rules Your Clicks’, Medium, 7 May 2015.
24. Flaxman S. et al., ‘Filter bubbles, echo chambers and online news consumption’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 2016.
25. Bail C.A. et al., ‘Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization’, PNAS, 2018.
26. Duggan M. and Smith A., ‘The Political Environment on Social Media’, Pew Research Center, 2016.
27. boyd dm., ‘Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics’, University of California, Berkeley PhD Dissertation, 2008.
28. Early example: ‘Dead pet UL?’ Posted on alt.folklore.urban, 10 July 1992.
29. Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, 16 May 1767.
30. Suler J., ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect’, Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 2004.
31. Cheng J. et al., ‘Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities’, Association for the Advancment of Artificial Intelligence, 2015; Cheng J. et al., ‘Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions’, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 2017.
32. Background on Facebook study from: Kramer A.D.I. et al., ‘Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks’, PNAS, 2014; D’Onfro J., ‘Facebook Researcher Responds To Backlash Against “Creepy” Mood Manipulation Study’, Insider, 29 June 2014.
33. Griffin A., ‘Facebook manipulated users’ moods in secret experiment’, The Independent, 29 June 2014; Arthur C., ‘Facebook emotion study breached ethical guidelines, researchers say’, The Guardian, 30 June 2014.
34. Examples: Raine R. et al., ‘A national cluster-randomised controlled trial to examine the effect of enhanced reminders on the socioeconomic gradient in uptake in bowel cancer screening’, British Journal of Cancer, 2016; Kitchener H.C. et al., ‘A cluster randomised trial of strategies to increase cervical screening uptake at first invitation (STRATEGIC)’, Health Technology Assessment, 2016. It’s worth
