Content Moderation with Opaque Policies

The authors thank Shai Bernstein, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Daniel Kornbluth, Sriram Krishnan, Mohamed Mostagir, Alex Nichifor, Leah Plunkett, Marco Reuter, Tim Roughgarden, Suproteem Sarkar, Alex Teytelboym, Liang Wu, and seminar audiences at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Harvard University for helpful comments. Kominers gratefully acknowledges support from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Ng Fund and the Mathematics in Economics Research Fund of the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications. Part of this work was conducted during the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute Fall 2023 program on the Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design, which was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMS-1928930 and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under grant G-2021-16778. Shapiro thanks his dedicated research assistants for their contributions to this project. Kominers is a Research Partner at a16z crypto, which reviewed a draft of this article for compliance prior to publication and is an investor in various online platforms, including social media platforms (for general a16z disclosures, see https://www.a16z.com/disclosures/). Notwithstanding, the ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors, rather than of a16z or its affiliates. Kominers also holds digital assets, including both fungible and non-fungible tokens, and advises a number of companies on marketplace and incentive design, including koodos and Quora. Any errors or omissions remain the sole responsibility of the authors. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.