I've spent a good part of the last year building a software system (it's for sale to anyone interested in buying it) that anticipates, benchmarks, and provides avenues for controlling viral information and content. What do I mean by viral?
Here's an example, let's say an event occurs in the early morning hours of Tuesday:
- as of the Tuesday morning commute a couple dozen people know about it,
- by noon Tuesday a couple of thousand people know about it,
- by Tuesday evening hundreds of thousands know about it,
- by Wednesday morning millions know about it,
- by Thursday its splashed across all of the major news organizations,
- by Friday, e-mail campaigns - critics - journalists are bombarding the government,
- by Friday evening, the White House and Congress launch a major investigation and an organizational purge.
Granted, this description is a bit of an exaggeration and the steps might vary somewhat, but the process is basically the same for every event. An event occurs and our global communications system amplifies it into a cacophony. Let's take two recent examples:
- An attempted airplane bomber (Newark).
- The assassination of a couple of CIA operatives in Afghanistan.
In both cases, relatively small events (in that neither threatened us, nor the organizations in question in any existential way) were amplified (in hours) to a level where the entire US government was put into a tailspin. Organizational purges and strategy rethinks were launched. Systemic failures were hinted at. Etc.
In short, the entire US government became a hostage to the global information network twice in the same week.
What can be done? The first thing that should be done when something like this occurs is to take a deep breath. Put the incident in perspective and communicate the same. It's not a real crisis. De-escalation should be the first response in anything but an acute existential emergency.
The second step? I'll leave that up to you guys. That's one of the reasons I built the software I mentioned.
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