Online crowds wield power, for good and bad

ITHACA, N.Y. – How do online crowds form, grow and behave? How do they wield influence? What distinguishes desirable crowd activism from mob harassment? A new Cornell Tech report analyzes these questions and more.

Following a two-day virtual workshop, Cornell Tech professor James Grimmelmann and postdoctoral fellow Charles Duan compiled “The Barons and the Mob: Essays on Centralized Platforms and Decentralized Crowds,” an introduction to the complexities of online crowds and the importance of understanding their nature in the context of efforts toward online platform regulation.

The report references a pair of online user “revolts.” In 2007, one of the users of news aggregator Digg posted an encryption key that could be used to circumvent copyright protection on Blu-Ray discs. Sixteen years later, Grimmelmann and Duan wrote, “history rhymed with itself” when Reddit, in preparation for a rumored IPO, started charging developers to access its previously free application programming interface. Users of both platforms rose up in revolt. In Digg’s case, the crowd won the revolt – not so with Reddit.

“The Digg disruption and the Reddit rebellion,” they wrote, “demonstrate the conflict between the two great sources of power on the Internet: the centralized platforms that control the infrastructure of online communities, and the decentralized crowds of users who come together in them.”

In all, a dozen experts share their perspectives in “The Barons and the Mob,” tackling what makes an online crowd; the influence of money on crowds; identifying misinformation; authenticity; network economics and other topics.

You can find a Q&A with the authors here.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.

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