Changing the hive mind -- How social media manipulation affects everything: Tim Weninger at TEDxUND

Tim Weninger, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, describes a study he conducted on reddit.com in which he had a computer program up-vote or down-vote the latest post every two minutes. As he explains, the experiment shows that early random up-votes makes a post 20 percent more likely to appear on the front page. His conclusion? Just one quarter of one percent of viewers determine what the rest of the site's readers see—so don't believe every trending content rating you see online.

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