Related papers: Governing Social Media as a Public Utility
We investigate the impact of free speech and the relaxation of moderation on online social media platforms using Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter as a case study. By curating a dataset of over 10 million tweets, our study employs a novel…
Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility,…
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…
We consider a distributed multi-user system where individual entities possess observations or perceptions of one another, while the truth is only known to themselves, and they might have an interest in withholding or distorting the truth.…
Bayesian Persuasion is proposed as a tool for social media platforms to combat the spread of misinformation. Since platforms can use machine learning to predict the popularity and misinformation features of to-be-shared posts, and users are…
The dissemination of information and the development of public opinion are essential elements of most social media platforms and are often described as distinct, man-made occurrences. However, what is often disregarded is the…
Warning users about misinformation on social media is not a simple usability task. Soft moderation has to balance between debunking falsehoods and avoiding moderation bias while preserving the social media consumption flow. Platforms thus…
How can individual agents coordinate their actions to achieve a shared objective in distributed systems? This challenge spans economic, technical, and sociological domains, each confronting scalability, heterogeneity, and conflicts between…
Social media platforms have become critical infrastructures for public communication, where large-scale interaction can both support socially beneficial collective pressure and amplify polarization and conflict. While opinion-dynamics…
Is a commercial mass media, dependent on the market for its sustenance, necessary, or even desirable, for liberal democracy? Yochai Benkler has argued that a decentralized, peer-to-peer system of communications and information is both…
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.
Considering electronic implications in the Information Society (IS) as a complex system, complexity science tools are used to describe the processes that are seen to be taking place. The sometimes troublesome relationship between the…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
Due to the recent popularity of online social networks, coupled with people's propensity to disclose personal information in an effort to achieve certain gratifications, the problem of navigating the tradeoff between privacy and utility…
Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to…
Communities are an important feature of social networks. In fact, it seems that communities are necessary for a social network to be efficient. However, there exist very few formal studies of the actual role of communities in social…
Addiction to internet-based social media has increasingly emerged as a critical social problem, especially among young adults and teenagers. Based on multiple research studies, excessive usage of social media may have detrimental…
We restrict the propagation of misinformation in a social-media-like environment while preserving the spread of correct information. We model the environment as a random network of users in which each news item propagates in the network in…
The massive spread of digital misinformation has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts…
Open data are held to contribute to a wide variety of social and political goals, including strengthening transparency, public participation and democratic accountability, promoting economic growth and innovation, and enabling greater…