Disinformation, Stochastic Harm, and Costly Filtering: A Principal-Agent Analysis of Regulating Social Media Platforms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The spread of disinformation on social media platforms such as Facebook is harmful to society. This harm can take the form of a gradual degradation of public discourse; but it can also take the form of sudden dramatic events such as the recent insurrection on Capitol Hill. The platforms themselves are in the best position to prevent the spread of disinformation, as they have the best access to relevant data and the expertise to use it. However, filtering disinformation is costly, not only for implementing filtering algorithms or employing manual filtering effort, but also because removing such highly viral content impacts user growth and thus potential advertising revenue. Since the costs of harmful content are borne by other entities, the platform will therefore have no incentive to filter at a socially-optimal level. This problem is similar to the problem of environmental regulation, in which the costs of adverse events are not directly borne by a firm, the mitigation effort of a firm is not observable, and the causal link between a harmful consequence and a specific failure is difficult to prove. In the environmental regulation domain, one solution to this issue is to perform costly monitoring to ensure that the firm takes adequate precautions according a specified rule. However, classifying disinformation is performative, and thus a fixed rule becomes less effective over time. Encoding our domain as a Markov decision process, we demonstrate that no penalty based on a static rule, no matter how large, can incentivize adequate filtering by the platform. Penalties based on an adaptive rule can incentivize optimal effort, but counterintuitively, only if the regulator sufficiently overreacts to harmful events by requiring a greater-than-optimal level of filtering.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".