Information Stewards and Normative Persuasion in Online Social Systems

Abstract

In online social communities, influencers, moderators of communities, new media figures, etc., hold a privileged position due to their visibility, and have been referred to as norm entrepreneurs because of their ability to broadcast their views about right and wrong. There have been calls to consider regulation and reevaluate their roles and responsibilities towards the health of our social institutions. However, an act of regulation needs understanding of their macro-level impact on society and a notion of ideal behaviour. In this paper, we take a step in that direction by formalising the following question. What should be the ideal behaviour of such highly visible entities towards mitigating adverse societal phenomena such as opinion polarisation. We refer to such entities as information stewards and answer the above question in three steps. First, we develop a model of opinion exchange mediated by descriptive norms using a coordination game. Next, we demonstrate the conditions under which opinion can become polarised organically due to imperfect observation and the incentives to stay silent. Finally, we formalise the optimal behaviour of information stewards as an information design problem solved using sequential Bayesian persuasion. We show that in the absence of information stewards, opinion polarisation can develop organically. Furthermore, we show that mitigation of polarisation depends on the proximity of stewards’ opinion to the descriptive beliefs of the community.