Existing research on information control and content moderation on social media generally focuses on platforms reacting to false information in democracies and the roles of governments in authoritarian contexts. However, observational evidence suggests that social media users themselves may sometimes prefer greater levels of information control in democracies and authoritarian regimes alike: many citizens do not simply dismiss or refute a message that they disapprove of but instead prefer a more costly approach of seeking its disappearance by reporting the information to social media platforms.
We propose to account for this phenomenon by noting the externalities of information: one’s utility may be affected by the presence of certain information not only through its influence on herself but also its potential influence on others. Although a user may not believe in a post on social media and/or will not be affected by their content, its existence may influence other users with different prior beliefs and/or incentives, and these externalities may jeopardize her utility more than the discounted risk of information control being strengthened in the future at her expense. In particular, she may even seek to have truthful information censored if she believes that censorship is sufficiently ubiquitous (so her report may trigger the information’s removal) and that other users may respond to the information in ways that severely undermine her utility. We relate this behavior to the prediction of the third-person effect hypothesis in sociology and communication, i.e., people tend to believe that information from mass media will affect others more than themselves and may therefore support stricter information control.
As such, when one’s perceived disutility from the externalities of certain content on social media increases, so will the demand for more control of such information. This perception can be affected by social fundamentals or by the audiences the content may reach. We will provide empirical evidence based on observational and experimental data.
