TY - GEN
T1 - The Design and Operation of Digital Platform under Sociotechnical Folk Theories
AU - Suchow, Jordan W.
AU - Burton, Lea
AU - Ashrafimoghari, Vahid
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2023. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - 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’ folk theories about the 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 first-party suspicions of shadowbanning in cases where the mechanism was not in fact invoked, we develop a computational cognitive model of users’ 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.
AB - 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’ folk theories about the 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 first-party suspicions of shadowbanning in cases where the mechanism was not in fact invoked, we develop a computational cognitive model of users’ 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.
KW - causal graphical models
KW - computational cognition
KW - Digital platforms
KW - folk theories
KW - shadowbanning
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85192941709
T3 - 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2023
BT - 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2023
T2 - 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems: Diving into Uncharted Waters, AMCIS 2023
Y2 - 10 August 2023 through 12 August 2023
ER -