The problem

The ubiquitous adoption of social media has facilitated the distribution of harmful content such as hate speech and disinformation. The reluctance of social media companies to handle harmful content and the lack of transparency in their moderation policies have led to calls for regulation of social media platforms.

However, the design and enforcement of social media regulation present critical difficulties for policymakers, including

• limited access to data, statistics, metrics, and algorithms
• lack of tools for predicting the impact and unintended consequences of specific regulations
• and diverse contexts of different countries

Our goal

To establish a clear, traceable, and replicable methodology to craft policy recommendations that effectively mitigate the harms of social media actors responsible for abusive and illicit behaviors.

Inputs from media policy and governance research will be used to formulate a set of policy alternatives that are expected to produce effective solutions for the mitigation of online harm. Computational social science methodologies will in turn model the effects of moderation policies and quantify their impact.

CARISMA will generate policy recommendations and quantitative evidence to classify regulatory policies and assess their expected impact within the information ecosystem. This will form the basis, for platforms and regulators of any country, to react in a timely fashion to social media misuse by crafting effective and transparent policy interventions.