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The cyberspace is oft likened to a giant electronic brain, with pages taking the identify of neurons, and Facebook likes, tweets, and page views operation as the firing of those neurons. Thus is the flow of information increased or dampened according to the amount of individual users who access and share it. When enough users share a certain thought, prototype, or meme on the cyberspace, it tends to go viral, growing in circulation exponentially in much the fashion a cascading firing of neurons causing a certain idea to ascent up from the subconscious and print itself upon the conscious mind.

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Dr. Paulo Shakarian, Manager of ASU'south CySIS

And but as this cascade of neural firing can cause a thought to enter our consciousness, leading to real world deportment, so can information flows on the internet pb to measurable real world consequences. For instance, it is an established tendency that when a newspaper runs an article nigh a suicide, immediately following the release of the story, the suicide rate in the area where that paper enjoys widespread circulation will increase. The act of reading about a suicide in result puts suicide on the heed of the readers and increases their likelihood of engaging in that behavior.

Then how exercise we stem the flow of certain ideas and opinions that lead to behavior that lodge deems regressive and detrimental? This question has been very much on the minds of researchers at Arizona Land University's CyberSocio Intelligent-Systems Laboratory or CySIS for brusk. The mission of their lab is to stall the spread of extremist ideologies online, of which ISIS is today the nigh prominent.

Dr. Hasan Davulcu of ASU's School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering explains, "We are developing meliorate tools to observe extremist networks promoting violence and cake their online content." Fundamental to their piece of work is the theory of informational cascades. Information cascades explains how a person observes the actions of others then—despite possible contradictions in his/her own private data signals—engages in the same acts. Such theories are central to understanding how a 15-twelvemonth-one-time, well-adjusted British girl might be lured into flying thousands of miles from home to join a terrorist arrangement similar ISIS.

Dr. Paulo Shakarian from CySIS explains how any data, terrorist or otherwise, tends to become viral: "Firstly, a message that disperses into a diversity of online communities is more probable to go viral. For instance, if you were to receive the same tweet from iii work colleagues, that's only actually 1 source and so is unlikely to spread much further. If, on the other hand, you were to receive a tweet from a family member, a work colleague, and an onetime college friend, that'south potentially more meaning. Nosotros have developed metrics to assess the significance of how a message or micro blog spreads online."

With the help of cutting edge software called LookingGlass, Dr. Paulo Shakarian and Dr. Hasan Davulcu are joining forces to combat the spread of extremist ideologies online. And every bit one would expect from the nature of their inquiry, the Usa military will be keeping a close eye on the results. This raises a nagging question about freedom of spoken communication: Once these technologies are mature, could they be turned to ends less noble than what Doctors Davulcu and Shakarian have in mind?

If these software algorithms can be used to thwart the spread of terrorism online, they might also be used to forestall the spread of other ideas that the operators frown upon. Whatsoever organization that could control the spread of an thought or political motility on the cyberspace would by defacto have i of the nigh powerful weapons on the face up of the planet. This begs the question: Could such a technology be even more than unsafe than the threat for which it was created to gainsay?