Speakers:

Cedric Langbort & So Sasaki, Coordinated Science Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC)

Title:

Some Models of Content Moderation for Social Networks in the Presence of Competition

Abstract:

The past decade has witnessed a range of shifting and sometimes contradictory behaviors among social media platforms regarding their content moderation policies. These behaviors often seem to have been adopted more as reactions to societal and legal pressures than as strategic choices aimed at better serving the platform's users or beating the competition. It is natural to wonder, however, whether a platform’s set of regulations, or lack thereof, can be used as a competitive advantage, since users may choose to switch to a competitor if they feel that the moderation rules in place limit their access to content they value.

We aim to address this question in this talk by asking what content moderation policy a platform should chose to satisfy its base and/or to become/remain dominant in a market where platforms compete for users and their attention.

More precisely, we consider two stylized settings (both being extensions of Morris' celebrated model of network contagion, one where platforms can curb the amount of deception employed by a news source, the other where they directly choose the kind of content that is allowed to circulate) and determine policies that two strategic and competing platforms can sustain in equilibrium when their users value both content and social interaction. In the first setting, we further investigate how the effectiveness of the policy depends on parameters such as network structure, news virality or size and cohesiveness of in-network communities... In the second setting, we study whether tailoring the moderation policy to different subgroups may help a platform better serve its users when it is in competition with others. While these models admittedly make a number of simplifying assumptions, which we discuss, we believe they provide valuable insight towards an economically normative view of content moderation for social networks.

Speaker Bio:

Cedric Langbort is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), where he is also affiliated with the Decision & Control Group at the Coordinated Science Lab (CSL), and the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He works on applications of control, game, and optimization theory to a variety of fields and co- founded and co-directed the Center for People & Infrastructures at CSL. His and his advisees’ work have garnered multiple recognitions such as a NSF CAREER Award, a Siebel Energy Institute Research Award, an IEEE CDC Best Student Paper Award and a NDSEG fellowship. Most recently, he has been leading a US DoD MURI project on Information Exchange Network Dynamics funded by ARO, in which, along with psychologists, communication scientists and behavioral economists, he investigates the dynamics of (mis)information over networks.

So Sasaki received his Bachelor and Masters of Engineering in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Tokyo, as well as an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree at the Decision and Control Group, Coordinated Science Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research interests include game, optimization, control, graph theory, and machine learning, with application to social media.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95560170313
Passcode: NICO25

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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