Social Value is unusual in that its CEO is a working professor, very much engaged in research. And SV is one of the coolest tools ever handed to researchers. Remember, it measures how much people impact each other to do…anything you can measure. At the startup, that’s money, but in the lab, that’s whatever we think is important.
One of those really cool projects was lead by my USC colleague Aimei Yang, and resulted in this paper.
A lot of researchers are worried about, and studying, misinformation. That’s the act of spreading falsehoods via social media. That means networks of people, which means SV can spot who drives the process. Prof. Yang used SV and found that the misinformation that spreads is heavily skewed to those who cause others to repost. Although we mostly talk about who causes who else to spend, it works here too. Who causes lies to spread?
We found that almost two-thirds of how misinformation spreads can be traced to who is influential, and we can spot it. So, if the goal is stopping lies, we have to look at it as a network. And, we know exactly who in that network to target. It’s the ones whose lies spread the most, and SV shows precisely who that is.
