A growing body of research suggests human behavior on social media is strikingly similar to collective behavior in nature.
Starlings at Hedgecourt Lake by Tom Lee, via CC
"While much is still mysterious and debated about the workings of murmurations, computational biologists and computer scientists who study them describe what is happening as 'the rapid transmission of local behavioral response to neighbors.' Each animal is a node in a system of influence, with the capacity to affect the behavior of its neighbors. Scientists call this process, in which groups of disparate organisms move as a cohesive unit, collective behavior. The behavior is derived from the relationship of individual entities to each other, yet only by widening the aperture beyond individuals do we see the entirety of the dynamic.
"A growing body of research suggests that human behavior on social media — coordinated activism, information cascades, harassment mobs — bears striking similarity to this kind of so-called “emergent behavior” in nature: occasions when organisms like birds or fish or ants act as a cohesive unit, without hierarchical direction from a designated leader. How that local response is transmitted — how one bird follows another, how I retweet you and you retweet me — is also determined by the structure of the network. For birds, signals along the network are passed from eyes or ears to brains pre-wired at birth with the accumulated wisdom of the millenia. For humans, signals are passed from screen to screen, news feed to news feed, along an artificial superstructure designed by humans but increasingly mediated by at-times-unpredictable algorithms." - Renée Diresta
Article: How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds