Collective Behavior And How The Masters Curate The Flocks

Shooting Starlings: How the Masters Curate the Flocks

Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• Human behavior on social media is similar to that of starlings in a murmuration. Masses of people react to a stimulus, such as a social media post, seemingly as a cohesive unit without a designated leader and, as a result, something goes “viral”
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• It appears to be a spontaneous event that no one can control, but it really isn’t. Curated information, pushed ahead of other information on people’s newsfeeds, can dramatically influence crowd behavior. It’s a form of social engineering
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• This kind of social engineering has a drawback. Financial incentives have driven social media companies to promote any content with high engagement. Those who seek to censor certain types of information now struggle to determine how to get Big Tech to change their underlying design
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• The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the key coordinator of illegal government censorship. Its original directive was to defend the U.S. against foreign cybersecurity threats. Now, CISA’s primary focus is domestic threats, i.e., Americans who challenge the government narrative
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• CISA works with a collective called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which does the actual censoring. The EIP consists of four social media monitoring groups: Stanford Internet Observatory, Washington University’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika

In a recent essay,1 Renée DiResta, who researches “pathological information systems”2 and “the spread of malign narratives” at Stanford Internet Observatory,3 reviewed online crowd behavior in response to curated information. The metaphor she uses is that of a flock of starlings, in which thousands of birds fly in what seems to be an impossibly coordinated dance known as murmuration. As explained by DiResta:4

“In a murmuration, each bird sees, on average, the seven birds nearest it and adjusts its own behavior in response. If its nearest neighbors move left, the bird usually moves left. If they move right, the bird usually moves right.

The bird does not know the flock’s ultimate destination and can make no radical change to the whole. But each of these birds’ small alterations, when occurring in rapid sequence, shift the course of the whole, creating mesmerizing patterns …

It is a logic that emerges from — is an embodiment of — the network … The stimulus — or information — passes from one organism to the next through this chain of connections …

Scientists call this process, in which groups of disparate organisms move as a cohesive unit,collective behavior. The behavior is derived from the relationship of individual entities to each other, yet only by widening the aperture beyond individuals do we see the entirety of the dynamic.”

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