Content Curation in Online Platforms

Online platforms like Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon, and Linkedin are embedded in the very fabric of our society. They “curate content”, moderate, recommend, and monetize it, and, in doing so, can impact people’s lives positively or negatively. In this talk, the sepaker will highlight the need to go beyond how these curation practices are currently designed and tested. He will argue that academic research can and should guide policy and best practices by discussing two projects he worked on during his doctorate. In the first project, the speaker will describe a large natural experiment on Facebook that allowed measuring the causal effect of removing rule-breaking comments on users’ subsequent behavior. In the second project, he will present results on the efficacy of “deplatforming” Parler, a large social media website, on its users’ information diets. Finally, the speaker will discuss future research directions on improving online platforms, emphasizing the opportunities and challenges posed by the popularization of generative AI. Altogether, the work of the speaker indicates that we can improve online platforms—and, by extension, our lives—if we rigorously investigate the causal effect of content curation practices.

Organized by:

Institute of AI in Management LMU Munich