@algobola
Disclaimer
Ebola is a serious business, people are dying. The best way to stop the spread of a disease is to contain it at source. There are many organisations actively involved in treating people in West Africa. Do your bit – lobby your politicians and shake them out of their apathy, or make a donation – I suggest the wonderful Médecins Sans Frontières as one such organisation worthy of your support.
Algobola is an investigation into social contagion.
Algobola infects Twitter, it is passed through the exchange of ‘social media fluids’ – in this case, the use of @ mentions. It’s an experiment to see how far a ‘social virus’ can travel, and whether its presence can have any effect on behaviour.
For the purposes of this experiment, I am patient zero – infectious to anyone I mention in my twitter feed (sorry friends). Once someone is exposed, they have a 50% chance of being infected. If they become infected, they are also contagious. There is a 30% chance of survival.
Changes in infectious status are sent directly to the affected user in the form of a modified avatar image.
Here’s a chart of some test data:
The number of infected people varies over time, depending on how promiscuous people are in their social network – to some extent it also reflects the day/night posting cycles of the infected population. This test had a 50/50 survival rate. The infection I’ve just started has only a 30% survival rate, so expect more death.
Infectious processes like this suffer from a computational explosion – within a few days, millions of people are affected. (Due to the limitations of Twitter’s rate limits, I can only monitor a few hundred people an hour, so the disease is going to be self-limiting.)
This work touches on two related ideas:
Firstly, it looks at how we respond to incurable diseases like Ebola.
In real terms, the experiment will infect a few thousand people – a drop in the ocean to 645,750,000 registered Twitter accounts. Indeed, this reflects the risk of contracting Ebola for those of us outside the currently infected areas. I’m sitting in Brighton, my chances of being exposed to Ebola at this point it time is effectively nil.
But our response to outbreaks like Ebola reflect who we are, as a collective humanity. It makes us question how far our empathy extends, and how we share our skills and resources in a time of crisis. The only sane response is treatment and containment at source.
However, human nature skews us towards conflating the risk of infection with the horror of actual disease. Because the disease is gruesome, horrific and arbitrary, we have a different kind of emotional response than we have towards real, but intangible threats, like global warming.
Secondly, it questions our apathy towards surveillance.
Algobola works across the network. The pattern of infection reflects social behaviours – it exposes who communicates with whom. This method of infection shares similarities with modern surveillance techniques. The number of ‘hops’ between you and a ‘person of interest’ can determine whether you are subject to further investigation, and can possibly result in real limits to your freedom.
Algobola explicitly exposes these kinds of connections, it shows how one random connection in your network may result in you being marked for ‘special attention’. Within a couple of hops the virus reaches thousands of people I’ve never met – when your government is ‘analysing your metadata’ the algorithms are working very much like a virus. Viruses are amoral, algorithms are much the same.
Will the introduction of this virus have any effect on Twitter behaviour? I’m not sure, I’m taking a baseline reading of how many mentions-per-day the user makes before and after the infection, so check back here for the results.
Originally published at www.shardcore.org.
Algobola is an interesting social experiment.
How fast a virus spreads depends upon two factors, probability of passing on the infection, how many contacts.
You as an individual come into contact with someone who is infected, you have a possibility of acquiring the infection, you in turn pass it on to those you are in contact with.
Ebola has been known about since the 1980s, but only infected small numbers. There is no cure, no vaccines, if you become infected, there is a 70% chance you will die (death rate can be as high as 90%). The current outbreak is different to those in the past. The number infected and the rate at which is is spreading.
The rate at which it is spreading, may be because it is centred on trade routes, also there is a possibility it has mutated.
Médecins Sans Frontières alerted WHO that this outbreak was different. WHO publicly played down the outbreak. We are now playing catchup. Meanwhile the virus spreads.
We are seeing gesture politics at work. Screening at airports. Fine as secondary line of defence, but not primary line of defence.
We should be suspending all flights to affected areas. We should be barring all immigrants from affected areas.
Australia has taken the sensible policy of denying visas to visitors from affected countries in West Africa.
Those who have volunteered to work in affected areas, with patients infected with Ebola, are to be praised for their public duty, but they must accept that they must be quarantined on return.
It only takes one infected person on a flight to Gatwick or Heathrow.
UK is free of rabies. It is free of rabies because dogs wishing to enter the UK have to go into quarantine.
The Black Death spread across Europe, then across to London. Panic ensured, people fled to the country, fearing to live in London, taking the disease with them. It was only the Great Fire of London that halted its spread.
One village, the villagers were isolated, food left outside the village, money left in a bowl carved in a stone wall, the bowl filled with vinegar. It did not save the villagers, it did stop the disease from spreading.
I have been exposed through my social network to someone who has tested positive for Algobola. My chances of developing Algobola are 50:50. We will not know for 24 hours. Everyone who is contact with me is at risk. Nearly two thousand contacts. Plus I assume anyone who picks up tweets via hashatgs and re-tweets. Because people who follow me, have large numbers of followers, in some cases millions, from one person being infected, ie me, millions are potentially at risk from Algobola.
Of course, if after 24 hours I am given the all clear, none of these millions are at risk, but until then they are. What this serves to empathise is the importance of bio-security, quarantine and isolation. That we cannot take the risk of a fatal disease for which there is no cure spreading.
Before you all panic, this is not a computer virus, it is a very clever social experiment. But is also illustrates how computer viruses so rapidly spread.
When I first got a message out of the blue, from an unknown source I immediately suspected a computer virus or an attack, and checked it out.
From whence did it come? I do not not, but I suspect Dougald Hine. If my suspicions are correct, then an alert within five hours of his contacting me.
My suspicions appear to be justified.
Intriguing, Algobola only released two days ago, and I am already in contact with someone tested positive for Algobola. Not only that, the confirmed positive case only contacted me this afternoon.
My writing on Algobola, reposting, reblogging original Algobola article is also possibly hastening the spread, as only those infected have their attention drawn to the article. Possibly could think of as a mutation.
More than forty eight hours have passed by, and I have not been confirmed infected. On the otherhand not been given the all clear either. I am in limbo.
But even if I am not infected, I could be infected by the next contact who is a confirmed case for Algobola.
I may have overstated the numbers I could potentially infect. It is not my number of followers, it is those I have social interaction with, those I @mention in a tweet, which could be those who neither follow me, nor I them.
It would appear that the reason I received no all clear or confirmation I was infected is that twitter has killed @algobola.
Bot-on-bot warfare.
