Traditional social psychology and behavioual science experiments have focused on individuals stripped away of context. An example would be Bartlett's work \cite{bartlett1932}on serial reproduction. In his famous "War of the Ghosts" experiment, he would ask people to read a passage and then copy it without looking. Today, online, we have the cut and paste function. We can "remember" anything we want by taking a picture of it or making a note of it. With our cellphones,  we'll always have our memories in our pocket.
More recent work, on heuristics and biases like Kahneman and Tversky's work on Prospect Theory \cite{Kahneman_1979} or Thaler's work on Behavioural biases \cite{Kahneman_1991} describes how individuals process information. Simply put, the idea is that people's biases stop them from looking at objective information rationally.
Outside of laboratories and thought experiments, the notion of "Objective Information" becomes more dubious. What country is Crimea in? Who is the President of Libya? Of Yemen? The answer is -it depends on who you ask.
With different narratives around the world competing on the same internet, who do you trust? 
The study of feedback loops to see how people process information online is not a study in objective truth- it is a study in subjective truth, why people believe what they believe. In this study, I am following in the work of the Father of Sociology, Emile Durkheim. He studied "the collective consciousness" and "conscious effervescence" over a hundred years ago. The study of how the group thinks has been continued by Pareto (Social Sentiment), Le Bon (The Madness of the Crowds), Moscovici (Social Representations), and others. However, instead of conducting hundreds of interviews, the social media age has produced mountains of data to analyse. Therefore, a robust tool to study how online conversations change is more valuable and useful than ever.

The Simplicity Loop

The Simplicity Loop arises when ideas are judged by popularity. A simple idea becomes popular, and generates a consensus which leads to further simplification. Why a simple idea? For a message to spread easily, it must be short and filled with redundancy\cite{Shannon1948}. For example, this tweet, "broken. from the bottom of my heart, i am so so sorry. i don’t have words" spread to 2.7 million people. In it, singer Ariana Grande post repeats a message of remorse in each short sentence. Meanwhile, intricate, meaning-rich posts such as this documentary on systems theory https://archive.org/details/Luhmann1973, remain obscure.  People are lazy and when given a choice between simplicity and complexity will tend towards simplicity \cite{Fiske_2013}. Simple spreads better. Simple becomes more popular.