I view this as the primary reason that protests and rioting have been significantly more widespread recently.
In order for someone to feel good about protesting and rioting, it helps if people around them are doing it, so that it seems socially acceptable, and so that negative consequences are less likely to occur.
Normally you would need to see this physically near you, but now with viral algorithms, all it takes is one protest in one location, broadcast to a billion people, and many of them will start to believe "there's all theses protests going on everywhere, so I might do it too".
In some forms this is useful, but in others it is extremely dangerous and can allow for mass unrest based only upon what uncontrollable algorithms end up promoting due to what is the most viral content.
Humans evolved in significantly smaller societies than they live in today, and it's very difficult to have proper intuition about how many people are doing various things after seeing hundreds of examples of them on the Internet. As a result I notice many people making estimates about the frequency of activities that are not only off by one order of magnitude, but sometimes more like three to six.
In order for someone to feel good about protesting and rioting, it helps if people around them are doing it, so that it seems socially acceptable, and so that negative consequences are less likely to occur. Normally you would need to see this physically near you, but now with viral algorithms, all it takes is one protest in one location, broadcast to a billion people, and many of them will start to believe "there's all theses protests going on everywhere, so I might do it too".
In some forms this is useful, but in others it is extremely dangerous and can allow for mass unrest based only upon what uncontrollable algorithms end up promoting due to what is the most viral content.
Humans evolved in significantly smaller societies than they live in today, and it's very difficult to have proper intuition about how many people are doing various things after seeing hundreds of examples of them on the Internet. As a result I notice many people making estimates about the frequency of activities that are not only off by one order of magnitude, but sometimes more like three to six.