Social Platform Trust & Safety

Some users may not want to see any potentially abusive content at all, while others may, for example, need to sift through banal personal attacks in order to track credible death threats. The point, however, is that users themselves should be able to exercise significantly more agency over their own social media experience.

Examples of truth queries include “How do you know this is true?” “Where did you learn this?” and “Do you have an example?” These questions may alert other users to pay more attention to the accuracy of the false information and communicate that the information is not universally accepted. In a series of three studies, we showed participants Tweets... See more

But there is a better solution: allowing users to ban with one click not just the author of a bigoted remark but also every one of the thousands of people who liked the offending post.

All of these ideas are free-speech friendly. They do not involve top-down censorship, but bottom-up user choice. Letting people police the content on their own pages and feeds is the natural next step for platforms that want to empower users rather than constantly surveil and censor them. Such features are also just common sense. No one has an inhe... See more