0:10one of the other things you talk about uh in your book is the Oprah moment on Twitter.
0:18Um, which was misunderstood when it happened.
0:21When when Oprah tweeted for the first time, uh, everybody everybody thought that she had animated this new network and that her engagement with it signified that there was something there and and you argue and others have argued, I think, um, that actually it's the other way around.
0:47It was that Oprah had suddenly realized how powerful this device was.
0:50That she realized that she needed to be a part of it because otherwise she would be left behind.
0:52Um, I'm curious to know whether the same thing applies to Trump.
0:58Did Twitter change in 2016 when he was elected?
1:04Did it become a more powerful entity or did he his voice transform it?
1:10Which which came first?
1:13Yeah, so the the case with Trump is actually different from the case with Oprah in a very important way, um, which is that the case with Trump was that he was amplifying a message that his, you know, followers already believed in.
1:43Um, and so he could be a leader in that space because as an influencer, and this is this sort of conceptual distinction that plays a huge role in the book and also in the science at this point of how we understand social change, is between what, you know, a simple contagion, which is a piece of information or an idea that kind of resonates with what we already think.
2:30Um, versus a complex contagion, which is a new initiative, an innovation, a new idea that actually forces us to kind of consider maybe it has some risks associated with it, we need to think about it first.
2:59And those two kinds of, um, contagions spread really differently.
3:14Um, the COVID-19 vaccine is a simple or the COVID-19, sorry, the virus is a simple contagion.
3:21It spreads through contact very very effectively.
3:24Um, vaccination is not a simple contagion, just because your someone got vaccinated, doesn't mean you're going to get vaccinated too.
3:31People have certain beliefs and they resist this idea of vaccination.
3:36And this is where social networks become, um, such a fascinating science because you've got all these paradoxes.
3:47Where the same exact networks that would allow, um, you know, a hate speech rally to be mobilized by, you know, President Trump.
4:00Um, those networks actually won't uh be very effective for counter mobilization, or for sort of changing people's beliefs about whether that's an acceptable thing to do. And so you need to sort of target and think about networks differently to understand the spread of a complex contagion.
4:26And so this is where Twitter because it was a new technology, it required social coordination, you had to sort of believe that it was worth the time to sign up, with more of a complex contagion, it grew through the kind of grassroots processes, took off, and it got so popular that someone like Oprah was sort of, um, first, you know, appreciative of the fact that this was going to be a valuable thing for her to do, um, whereas with, with Trump and with mobilizing the sort of initiatives that he wanted to mobilize in with articulating and fomenting the kind of, um, hate speech that he wanted to promote, he was speaking to, you know, um, the choir as it were, right?
5:36He was talking to people who sort of already believed and were already willing to advocate for that kind of thing, and so he was just kind of animating and amplifying something they already believed.
5:49So that difference between simple in the case of Trump and complex in the case in the case of Oprah helped us to understand why the networks operated differently in these two different cases.
