At the beginning of this month, a clever illustration of the power of information cascades was carried out in the even seedier underground of politics: partisan blogging. As Josiah Roe, Executive VP of Coptix, Inc., which provides backup DNS hosting for sites such as “georgewbush.com”, writes, his company decided decided to do a little test on April 1st. Starting with a photograph of Vice President Dick Cheney, a few minutes work produced a similar photo, but with a suspicious file-folder now located under his arm, labeled “COPTIX”. The doctored photo was then given to a right-wing blogger who was in on the plan, a number of links were posted to other blogging and social-networking sites, and the fun began. In short order, tens of thousands of people were viewing the image, and propagating the information on their own blogs. From there it then spread to big-name political blogs like Wonkette and Daily Kos — which combined have over a million unique visitors every day — and within a few short days from its creation, the falsified image had been seen by millions of people as evidence of Cheney’s illegal relocation of damaging emails.

This experiment reveals some of the power that information cascades have in all parts of the political arena. Once given a reasonably plausible (but not necessarily reliable) source, many people will accept the new information as fact, provided that it fits with their preconceived ideas. From there, the idea picks up speed in the community, and in a short time it will have enough attention to be picked up by one of the larger sites, and may even spread to more mainstream newspaper or TV news organizations if left unchecked. The most important factor seems to be the low level of information required to tip the first bloggers, due to their own biases. While these liberal blogs would be unlikely to pick up on something that contradicted their own beliefs without very strong, factual evidence, and perhaps not even then, a hoax of this fashion needs only the least shreds of credibility to be propagated at first, and once it reaches this tipping point, it builds enough momentum to convince even the more reputable blogs of its veracity. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that the story got much less press on the other side of the aisle, since both the idea and the myriad sources quoting it as truth were much less palatable to conservatives, resulting in insufficient impetus to start another cascade.