Infodemics

In a 2007 study on global risks, a group working on behalf of the World Economic Forum identified a collection of highly interconnected risk factors, and explored various scenarios in which these factors often influenced each other and in some cases amplified the effects of others.

The scenarios worked through are chilling, such as a world pandemic which leads to heightened militarism and authoritarian controls lead to drastic shifts in global geopolitics. However, their second scenario, “Out Of The Global Warming Frying Pan (And Into The Fiscal Fire)”, shows the contribution of bottom-up social communication — anti-government text messaging in China — to the cascade of events leading to a global financial collapse.

Information asymmetry also plays a key role in this scenario, which illustrates the knock-on effects of a major shift in risk perception: namely, that climate change has arrived.

Events in 2007 trigger an inflection point in global concern over the consequences of climate change.

First, massive inland flooding in South Asia resulting from a late monsoon leads to crop failure, as well as mass migrations. Tensions rise on the Bangladesh-India border as thousands flee humanitarian disaster. In the Americas, oil supply is still disrupted from 2007 tropical storms; an unprecedented cold snap in the north-east of the US leads to a spike in heating-fuel prices as domestic and local supplies are exhausted. Finally, figures released in December 2007 show an unprecedented spike in the global temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius for the year as a whole.



China’s remarkable story of 28 years of economic growth – a Citigroup Global Capital Markets report (22 November 2006) predicts real GDP growth of 9.8% in 2007 and 10.7% in 2008 – is disturbed by awareness of environmental degradation and inequality between “many Chinas”. Some 150 million surplus rural workers drift between villages and cities by 2008, with many subsisting through part-time, low-paying jobs. This dislocation is masked by unreliable official figures, but eventually causes widespread civil unrest. In part due to the Beijing Olympics, the government is initially unable to calm demonstrations resulting from viral text-message campaigns. The protests seize the mood of global discontent and speak loudly on the issue of environmental degradation.

In North America, public concern over climate change leapfrogs scientific consensus. High oil prices cause a pull back from US asset markets, bursting that country’s “housing bubble”. Popular discontent results in calls for radical action.

In the United States, legislators follow California’s populist lead, establishing a national carbon trading scheme and creating industry incentives for conservation and alternative energy. In late 2008, the US administration releases a white paper entitled “From Addiction to Oil, to Blessed by Biofuel”, signalling an enhanced focus in US energy policy on biofuels, particularly relevant to farming communities in the American Mid-West. The white paper wins political support both from “hawks” seeking US energy independence and those fearing climate change.

This policy response has the unintended consequence of setting up acute competition for productive land, between food, fuel, forests and fibre, with increased carbon sequestration and mining activities competing at the margin. Prices rise for agricultural commodities and land.

Meanwhile, China concludes the only practical option for the country’s future energy needs is nuclear, with coal-fired electricity as a bridging source. The government announces large-scale infrastructure spending and concludes negotiations with major suppliers of uranium.

While supply constraints and elevated demand keep oil prices high over 2007 to 2010, other developing countries follow China’s lead, and demand the right to sovereign control of the nuclear fuel cycle. This puts increasing pressure on the international nuclear non-proliferation regime, causing it to reach a tipping point. The continued failure of the international community to halt Iran’s nuclear programme leads that country to proclaim successful enrichment in early 2015.

Global concerns cause risk premiums to rise, and equities to slide. In North America and Europe, retirement funds are impacted. Governments are put under pressure to increase state financial support, causing fiscal positions to worsen, particularly in Europe. At the same time, the bursting of the US housing bubble and declines in equity markets cause private savings in major developed economies to rise – beginning a process of correcting long-standing global economic imbalances.

While you may not agree with all aspects of the scenario — I am personally terrified that acceptance of climate change could precipitate such negative outcomes — the point I am drawing your attention to is the use of text messaging as a social accelerant for change, which in this case hastens a scramble away from fossil fuels.

The authors make the case that the ‘rapid spread of inaccurate or incomplete information can amplify the effects of the core risk event.” They call this amplification an “Infodemic”, where the power of a communication medium spreads tainted information and causes people to undertake actions that could spread and thereby increase the negative impacts of the core risk event. In the scenario explored above, the information being spread by the Chinese workers was possibly complete and accurate, however, and it still contributed to a dangerous, and perhaps inevitable, cascade of events.

We can sometimes act like well-intentioned bystanders who run into a burning house to save its occupants, and become trapped ourselves. Or worse, we escape in flames, and run down the street, setting the entire neighborhood on fire.

Social tools have the ability to amplify or counter the spread of information: it’s built into their very nature. We can speed the spread of toxic info when the social system is an unreflecting mob, when mass broadcast prevails. However, when people act as people — thinking beings — and not like cattle, an budding infodemic can be cut short. However, to do so we have to rely on actual social relationships and social reputation.

In the case of the Chinese workers, what was really the case? Their growing perception of the pollution being caused by a rapidly growing, unchecked economic expansion was accurate, and their demands that something should be done was reasonable. So taking rational actions in an irrational context can lead to giant amplification, which can can lead to good or bad final outcomes depending on what transpires downstream.

So, what do we do if we want to be informed actors in this interconnected world? How can we avoid acting as a carrier of diseased information, an agent of the infodemic?

One solution is to rely on social scale. Consider the bearer of a snippet of news: do I know and trust her? Has she jumped off the cliff with the lemmings in the past? Or is she more likely to use her discerning judgment to weed out bad information?

We, the people living in the network, the living breathing nodes of this social universe, we are both the early warning system and the immune response to infodemics. No one will be better able than us to slow the spread of dangerous unchecked feedback in the world infosphere.

But the chance exists that we could unwittingly become an accelerant, mindlessly retweeting out partial information without considering the impact of our actions, and setting a larger fire than the one we are warning people about. It’s even possible that striving to spread insight in an attempt to motivate others to do the right thing, like awareness of climate change, can lead to unintended consequences, especially in a world that seems intent on pretending it isn’t happening. We could be like the text messaging Chinese in the Frying Pan/Fire scenario, who precipitate a global fiscal collapse because they wanted to stop pollution.