Colbert spreads disease

Stephen Colbert created and spread a disease about his network of viewers. This time, he simply encouraged viewers to write-in the name "Colbert" for a contest that NASA held to name a new module that will become part of the ISS. Sure enough, his viewers wrote in the name "Colbert" and a few in them probably got others to enter the name into the contest as well. At the end of the contest, the disease spread to about 230,000 people, as that's how many write-ins there were for the name "Colbert" making it the winner.

Although Colbert Viewership isn't like a true social network, it still can be used to help visualize how a disease can spread among people. It starts at the center with Colbert and affects everyone directly watching the Colbert Report and then goes onto friends of those that watch Colbert Report and convinced them to join in on the name contest as well.


"Colbert" wins name contest: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/03/23/nasa-colbert.html
NASA announces module name on Colbert Report: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/04/12/colbert-nasa-announcement.html
What NASA actually did: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2009/04/15/nasa-colbert-treadmill.html

This is also a good example of the rich-get-richer phenomenon because there were a few people who took Colbert seriously and submitted Colbert as a write-in in the beginning but the rest of the people probably did it because they saw that people did it before them and then joined the crowd and before we knew it, Colbert won the naming contest.

Colbert did the same thing with a bridge in Hungary. Chuck Norris was a clear winner before Colbert told his viewers to vote for him, causing his name to reach 17 million votes in a week (which is almost twice the population of Hungary). Relating this to a virus is even easier, since some viewers wrote scripts to vote thousands of time for Colbert autonomously, which illustrates how some people are extremely motivated to wreck havoc on the internet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megyeri_Bridge

Its funny to think what could be done by a group of people obediently following one individual. These examples may be harmless right now, but if someone in a position of power in a social network wanted to do some harm, this could be easily done because of how well connected people are these days. Interesting thing to think about.