CAM Colloquium - Andreas Malikopoulos, CEE, Cornell University "Social Media and Misleading Information in a Democracy: A Mechanism Design Approach"

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Title: Social Media and Misleading Information in a Democracy: A Mechanism Design Approach

Abstract: We live in a post-truth era, wherein the deluge of information on the Internet has made it extremely difficult to identify facts. As a result, individuals tend to form their opinions based on the believability of presented information rather than its truthfulness. This phenomenon is exacerbated by the business practices of social media platforms, which often seek to maximize the engagement of their users at all costs. Social media platforms form an ideal terrain to conduct political misinformation campaigns. Such campaigns are effective tools to disrupt democratic institutions because the functioning of stable democracies relies on common knowledge about the political actors and the processes they can use to gain public support. The trust held by the citizens of a democracy on “common knowledge” includes that: 1) all political actors act in good faith when contesting for power; 2) elections lead to a fair transfer of power; and 3) democratic institutions ensure that elected officials wield their power responsibly. In contrast, citizens of democracies often have “contested knowledge” regarding who should hold power and how they should use it. I consider that social media platforms pose the technologies to filter or label posts, which can eventually diminish trust in common knowledge. Thus, the government seeks to incentivize social media platforms to use these technologies to filter misinformation. In this talk, I present a resource allocation mechanism to incentivize misinformation filtering among social media platforms and, thus, indirectly prevent the spread of fake news. I consider the presence of a strategic government and private knowledge of how misinformation affects the users of social media platforms. The proposed mechanism strongly implements all generalized Nash equilibria for efficient filtering of misleading information in the induced game with a balanced budget. I also show that for quasi-concave utilities, the mechanism implements a Pareto- efficient solution.

Bio: Andreas Malikopoulos is a Professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Information and Decision Science Lab at Cornell University. Prior to these appointments, he was the Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2017-2023) and the founding Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Center (2019-2023) at the University of Delaware (UD). Before he joined UD, he was the Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow (2010-2017) in the Energy & Transportation Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Deputy Director of the Urban Dynamics Institute (2014-2017) at ORNL, and a Senior Researcher in General Motors Global Research & Development (2008-2010). He received a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004 and 2008, respectively, all in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests span several fields, including analysis, optimization, and control of cyber-physical systems; decentralized stochastic systems; stochastic scheduling and resource allocation; and learning in complex systems. Dr. Malikopoulos is the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the 2007 Dare to Dream Opportunity Grant from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the 2007 University of Michigan Teaching Fellow, the 2010 Alvin M. Weinberg Fellowship, the 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Young Researcher Award, and the 2020 UD’s College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to participate in the 2010 German-American Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium and organize a session on transportation at the 2016 European-American FOE Symposium. He has also been selected as a 2012 Kavli Frontiers of Science Scholar by the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Malikopoulos has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems from 2017 through 2020. He is an Associate Editor of Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and a Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ASME, and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society.