Will the crowd game the algorithm? Using layperson judgments to combat misinformation on social media by downranking distrusted sources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How can social media platforms fight the spread of misinformation? One possibility is to use newsfeed algorithms to downrank content from sources that users rate as untrustworthy. But will laypeople unable to identify misinformation sites due to motivated reasoning or lack of expertise? And will they “game” this crowdsourcing mechanism to promote content that aligns with their partisan agendas? We conducted a survey experiment in which N = 984 Americans indicated their trust in numerous news sites. Half of the participants were told that their survey responses would inform social media ranking algorithms - creating a potential incentive to misrepresent their beliefs. Participants trusted mainstream sources much more than hyper-partisan or fake news sources, and their ratings were highly correlated with professional fact-checker judgments. Critically, informing participants that their responses would influence ranking algorithms did not diminish this high level of discernment, despite slightly increasing the political polarization of trust ratings.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.120 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".