Dongkyu Chang (City University of Hong Kong); Adrian Segura (Pompeu Fabra University); Pengfei Zhang (University of Texas at Dallas)
Abstract
In this paper, we apply bargaining game and mechanism design to the study of platform content moderation. We start by analyzing and comparing four popular moderation procedures: centralization, flagging, counter-notice, and voting. Among the four, counter-notice minimizes the over-removal error, voting minimizes the under-removal error, and centralization minimizes the procedural cost. We generalize the welfare comparison to a mechanism design setup where the platform specifies the assignment and cost rules. The error-free mechanism that implements the efficient assignment rule is a repeated counter-notice procedure similar to Wikipedia's Talk Page. The consumer optimal mechanism that trades off errors with costs is instead centralized platform adjudication, which is common in spam filters.