online spread of ideas and news, yet
we lack models to predict the behavior change produced by this very same
campaign. We argue these failures of
use and prediction are not caused by a
lack of expertise in data analysis, but by
an insufficient focus on the underlying
incentive structures—the hidden network of interpersonal motivations that
provide the engine for collective decision making and action.
A number of large-scale social mobilization experiments have revealed
the important role of incentive structures in realistic, adversarial settings.
These planetary-scale experiments
include the DARPA Network Challenge to locate 10 weather balloons
tethered at random locations all over
the continental U.S., which was won
by our team using a recursive incentive scheme to recruit an estimated
two million searchers within 48 hours;
the DARPA Shredder Challenge, in
which we recruited over 3,500 individuals to collaboratively assemble
real shredded documents; and the
most recent U.S. State Department’s
Tag Challenge, in which we recruited
volunteers to locate individuals “at
large” in remote cities within 12 hours
and won again using the very same incentive scheme. In each challenge, all
competing teams had the same type
of message (that is, find the balloons,
assemble shreds, find the target individuals), and many of them managed
to create viral campaigns that reached
large populations and created awareness, yet the efficiency of the strategies
varied widely and was strongly correlated with the manner in which their
incentive design matched the motivations of the participants. Even in the
simple task of finding balloons, we saw
teams tapping into people’s incentives
toward personal profit, charity, reciprocity, or entertainment, with varying degrees of success. Some incentive
structures posed by competing teams
were compatible with the internal incentive structures of the individuals,
and could therefore switch them ‘on’,
activating a network cascade of actions, whereas others did not succeed
to do so.
We believe incentive networks play
an important middle layer between
higher-order concepts such as ideolo-
gies and culture, and the digital finger-
prints left by social movements in on-
line digital platforms such as Twitter
and Facebook. Ideologies and culture
shape what individuals want to achieve
as they go about their daily life, how
they relate to each other’s well-being,
and how they help each other achieve
those goals. This can be mapped into a
network of incentives where each indi-
vidual payoff depends on others indi-
vidual payoff. Incentives structures are
shaped by more abstract underlying
processes, but can be mapped quanti-
tatively by these large-scale collective
action experiments.
The inability to sustain and trans-
fer bursts of social mobilization in
order to create lasting social change
is rooted in the design of today’s digi-
tal social media. Today’s social media
is designed to maximize information
propagation and virality (through op-
timization of clicks and shares) to the
detriment of engagement and con-
sensus building. For instance, Onnela
and Reed-Tsochas19 demonstrate that
even when external signals are absent,
digital social influence spontaneously
assumes an unstable all-or-nothing
nature. The result is “flash fads,” the
ever-changing inception, competition,
and death of new fads that annihilate
each other, as they compete for peo-
ple’s attention, with no long-lasting re-
sult.
31 Effective social mobilization is a
product of both information diffusion
and action recruitment incentives, yet
the pressures of the social media busi-
ness have focused on diffusion to the
detriment of incentives for recruiting
people to act. Even from the business
perspective, social media is extraordi-
narily ineffective at the goal of recruit-
ment to action, for example, clicking
through ads to purchase. The best
Why isn’t
social media
a more reliable
channel for
constructive
social change?
Calendar
of Events
April 3–6
ISPD’16: International
Symposium on Physical Design,
Santa Rosa, CA,
Sponsored: ACM/SIG,
Contact: Fung Yu Young,
Email: fyyoung@cse.cuhk.edu.hk
April 4–8
SAC 2016: Symposium on
Applied Computing,
Pisa, Italy,
Sponsored: ACM/SIG,
Contact: Sascha Ossowski,
Email: sascha.ossowski@urjc.es
April 11–14
CPS Week ‘16: Cyber Physical
Systems Week 2016,
Vienna, Austria,
Contact: Radu Grosu,
Email: grosu@cs.sunysb.edu
April 12–14
HSCC’16: 19th International
Conference on Hybrid Systems:
Computation and Control
(part of CPS Week),
Vienna, Austria,
Contact: Alessandro Abate,
Email: a.abate@tudelft.nl
April 12–14
ICCPS ‘16: ACM/IEEE 7th
International Conference
on Cyber-Physical Systems
(with CPS Week 2016),
Vienna, Austria,
Contact: Ian Mitchell,
Email: mitchell@cs.ubc.ca
April 12–14
IPSN ‘16: The 14th International
Conference on Information
Processing in Sensor Networks
(co-located with CPS Week 2016),
Vienna, Austria,
Contact: George J. Pappas,
Email: pappasg@seas.upenn.edu
April 18–21
EuroSys ‘16: 11th EuroSys
Conference 2016,
London, U. K.,
Sponsored: ACM/SIG,
Contact: Peter R Pietzuch,
Email: prp@doc.ic.ac.uk