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Hauptverfasser: Ahmadi, Saba, Blum, Avrim, Xu, Haifeng, Yao, Fan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20061
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author Ahmadi, Saba
Blum, Avrim
Xu, Haifeng
Yao, Fan
author_facet Ahmadi, Saba
Blum, Avrim
Xu, Haifeng
Yao, Fan
contents User-generated content (UGC) on social media platforms is vulnerable to incitements and manipulations, necessitating effective regulations. To address these challenges, those platforms often deploy automated content moderators tasked with evaluating the harmfulness of UGC and filtering out content that violates established guidelines. However, such moderation inevitably gives rise to strategic responses from users, who strive to express themselves within the confines of guidelines. Such phenomena call for a careful balance between: 1. ensuring freedom of speech -- by minimizing the restriction of expression; and 2. reducing social distortion -- measured by the total amount of content manipulation. We tackle the problem of optimizing this balance through the lens of mechanism design, aiming at optimizing the trade-off between minimizing social distortion and maximizing free speech. Although determining the optimal trade-off is NP-hard, we propose practical methods to approximate the optimal solution. Additionally, we provide generalization guarantees determining the amount of finite offline data required to approximate the optimal moderator effectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20061
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Strategic Filtering for Content Moderation: Free Speech or Free of Distortion?
Ahmadi, Saba
Blum, Avrim
Xu, Haifeng
Yao, Fan
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
User-generated content (UGC) on social media platforms is vulnerable to incitements and manipulations, necessitating effective regulations. To address these challenges, those platforms often deploy automated content moderators tasked with evaluating the harmfulness of UGC and filtering out content that violates established guidelines. However, such moderation inevitably gives rise to strategic responses from users, who strive to express themselves within the confines of guidelines. Such phenomena call for a careful balance between: 1. ensuring freedom of speech -- by minimizing the restriction of expression; and 2. reducing social distortion -- measured by the total amount of content manipulation. We tackle the problem of optimizing this balance through the lens of mechanism design, aiming at optimizing the trade-off between minimizing social distortion and maximizing free speech. Although determining the optimal trade-off is NP-hard, we propose practical methods to approximate the optimal solution. Additionally, we provide generalization guarantees determining the amount of finite offline data required to approximate the optimal moderator effectively.
title Strategic Filtering for Content Moderation: Free Speech or Free of Distortion?
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20061