GWU-based group pioneering the new science of interacting humans, technology, and AI
Nature Research Highlights
Harmful online information can lead to many forms of online anti-X hate, where X can be races, ethnicity, or even vaccines. Such anti-X hate can drive certain groups to extremism and induce dangerous misbehavior, such as the incident of the US capital riot in January 2021.
NBC
Members of the loose-knit Boogaloo movement who found each other online joined armed protests against Covid lockdowns.
Simplifying Complexity
When a system fails, how do you think about cause and effect? One way to consider this in complex systems is to imagine a pile of sand, and dropping one grain of sand at a time in random positions onto the pile. As time passes, you’ll start to form little hills. Eventually, a grain of sand will hit one of these hills, and you get an avalanche.
The Hindu
Scientists have been able to model the dynamics of online hate communities with equations used to describe shock waves.
Physical Review Letters
Online communities featuring “anti-X” hate and extremism, somehow thrive online despite moderator pressure. We present a first-principles theory of their dynamics, which accounts for the fact that the online population comprises diverse individuals and evolves in time. The resulting equation represents a novel generalization of nonlinear fluid physics and explains the observed behavior across scales. Its shockwavelike solutions explain how, why, and when such activity rises from “out-of-nowhere,” and show how it can be delayed, reshaped, and even prevented by adjusting the online collective chemistry. This theory and findings should also be applicable to anti-X activity in next-generation ecosystems featuring blockchain platforms and Metaverses.
Pedro Manrique, Frank Yingjie Huo, Sara El Oud, Minzhang Zheng, Lucia Illari, and Neil Johnson
Physics Magazine
A theory derived from nonlinear fluid dynamics is able to reproduce the formation dynamics of online hate communities—offering insights that could inform public policies.
Axios
American extremists are consistently turning up on loosely-governed Russian social media platforms.
Virtual panel talk at Navigating Infodemics and Building Trust during Public Health Emergencies, April 2023, National Academy of Sciences: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27188/interactive/#section5
Oxford Academic
Disasters are fortunately uncommon events. Far more common are events that lead to societal crises, which are notable in their impact, but fall short of causing a disaster. Such near-miss events may be reimagined through stochastic modeling to be worse than they actually were. These are termed downward counterfactuals. A spectrum of reimagined events, covering both natural and man-made hazards, are considered. Included is a counterfactual version of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Attention to this counterfactual coronavirus in 2015 would have prepared the world better for COVID-19.
Gordon Woo, Neil Johnson