2023/05/05 by Jordan W. Suchow, Suchow, Jordan W., L R Burton +3
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Social Media and Politics #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.03291
openalex publication_date 2023/05/05 · openalex created_date 2023/05/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We consider the problem of how a platform designer, owner, or operator can improve the design and operation of a digital platform by leveraging a computational cognitive model that represents users's folk theories about a platform as a sociotechnical system. We do so in the context of Reddit, a social media platform whose owners and administrators make extensive use of shadowbanning, a non-transparent content moderation mechanism that filters a user's posts and comments so that they cannot be seen by fellow community members or the public. After demonstrating that the design and operation of Reddit have led to an abundance of spurious suspicions of shadowbanning in case the mechanism was not in fact invoked, we develop a computational cognitive model of users's folk theories about the antecedents and consequences of shadowbanning that predicts when users will attribute their on-platform observations to a shadowban. The model is then used to evaluate the capacity of interventions available to a platform designer, owner, and operator to reduce the incidence of these false suspicions. We conclude by considering the implications of this approach for the design and operation of digital platforms at large.