Related papers: A Pluralist Approach to Democratizing Online Disco…

Moderating user-generated content on online platforms is crucial for balancing user safety and freedom of speech. Particularly in the United States, platforms are not subject to legal constraints prescribing permissible content. Each…

Since this century, the speed, availability, and plethora of online informational content have made it increasingly difficult for humans to keep an overview of real-world situations, build a personal opinion, and sometimes even decide on…

Mainstream social media platforms function as "walled garden" ecosystems that restrict user agency, control, and data portability. They have demonstrated a lack of transparency that contributes to a multitude of online harms. Our research…

Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW)…

Unlike the more observable phenomenon of group opinion reinforcement, self-censorship online has received comparatively less attention. Our goal in this work is to dissect the phenomena of self-censorship and to examine the implications of…

The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…

Personalization is pervasive in the online space as, when combined with learning, it leads to higher efficiency and revenue by allowing the most relevant content to be served to each user. However, recent studies suggest that such…

AI-based social media platforms has already transformed the nature of economic and social interaction. AI enables the massive scale and highly personalized nature of online information sharing that we now take for granted. Extensive…

Given the stated preferences of several people over a number of proposals regarding public policy initiatives, some of those proposals might be judged to be more ``divisive'' than others. When designing online participatory platforms to…

Expressions of dissent against authority are an important feature of most societies, and efforts to suppress such expressions are common. Modern digital communications, social media, and Internet surveillance and censorship technologies are…

In recent years, social media has increasingly become an important platform for political campaigns, especially elections. It remains elusive how exactly public discourse is driven by the intricate interplay between individual…

Over the past decade, contrary to the early popular expectation that large-scale discourse in online communities would foster greater consensus, the large-scale structure of online discourse has been measured to be strongly polarized.…

Crowdsourcing is rapidly evolving and applied in situations where ideas, labour, opinion or expertise of large groups of people are used. Crowdsourcing is now used in various policy-making initiatives; however, this use has usually focused…

This article proposes a framework for content moderation based on a decentralized market where no one party, neither governments nor firms, controls the flow of information.

Numerous parties are calling for the democratisation of AI, but the phrase is used to refer to a variety of goals, the pursuit of which sometimes conflict. This paper identifies four kinds of AI democratisation that are commonly discussed:…

We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the…

Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…

Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…

This paper examines how social media algorithms and filter bubbles contribute to the fragmentation of online discourse, fostering ideological divides and undermining shared understanding. Drawing on Michael Sandels philosophical emphasis on…

In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…