Economics of Misinformation Working Group

Chair: Cedar Milazzo

Members: William Skeet, John Gray, Gabriel Altay, Megan Marelli

Mission Statement

The Economics of Misinformation WG aims to examine the publishing and advertising business models and systems that financially incentivize misinformation and disinformation, and support existing and propose new market-force driven and regulated solutions.

Scope

The main objective of this working group is to identify the major economic forces in the misinformation ecosystem and propose ways to reduce the monetary rewards for producing misinformation.

The topics and questions we will focus on include:

Research

• How does the current online publishing business model (through operations, capabilities, incentives) allow inadvertent funding misinformation?
• What incentives currently exist to generate misinformation?
• What incentives currently exist to direct money away from misinformation?

Solutions

• What incentives are necessary to attract sustainable funding to legitimate, credible, high-quality content?
• What changes in the publishing and advertising ecosystem are necessary in order to create these incentives?

Deliverables

Phase One (Research) (3 months)

• Literature Review: Gather and organize literature and published papers, reports, etc on this topic, Stretch goal: identification of gaps in the research.
• Develop Framework: The development of the first version of a categorization model (list/matrix/framework, etc) for capturing methods, examples, etc. of the advertising and publishing business models and systems that support misinformation & disinformation.
• Publication: Sharing a couple of case studies to understand at a granular level how the system(s) works, which will either convert into a reported story or blog post(s). Analysis of why previous efforts at stopping misinformation are not working and why attacking the economic system will work. Ex: Follow ad fraud (bot-clicks) and correlate to misinformation sources Ex: Can we differentiate between “rent gatherers” and those intentionally sowing chaos? Does this matter, or should we focus on the activity itself? How do they operate differently?

Phase Two (Propose Solutions) (3 months)

• Identification of possible ways to attack the economic system: Brainstorm set of solutions, then critique and identify potentially workable solutions and explore feasibility

• The publication of a report detailing findings and proposed solutions: What are the weaknesses in the platforms that are allowing this misinformation to spread? What are feasible ways to impose costs on those who are behaving badly? Presentation of findings at conference(s) (CredCo, MisinfoCon, Mozfest, wikiMedia etc)

Duration

This working group is currently scheduled to meet for a 6 month time period: from March, 2020 until August, 2020; review of scope and extension to timeline will be reviewed in July-August 2020.

Milestones

1. Mid-April, Literature Review delivery
2. Mid-May, Framework delivery
3. Mid-June, Case Study publication
4. Mid-Late June, Phase 2 planning
5. End July, Identify top X potential solutions
6. End August, Draft report on solutions
7. End September, Presentation of findings

Confidentiality

All of our working documents will be publicly accessible via our shared Google Drive folder for the 6 month duration of this working group, though not actively publicized. You should be okay with public attribution of your work in the form of blog posts or publications.

Communication Mechanisms

The Economics of Misinformation Working Group will be holding bi-weekly meetings at the same time. Notes will be taken from each meeting. We also have a Slack channel for regular communications, research brainstorming and sharing of relevant resources.

How to Join the Working Group

Anyone can join the working group after reviewing and consenting to the working group charter. Any interested new participants can email someone already involved for more information.