Misinformation as Information Pollution
This addresses misinformation as a societal issue for social media users and policymakers, offering a novel economic policy approach.
The paper tackles the problem of misinformation on social media by proposing a Pigouvian tax, similar to environmental pollution taxes, to incentivize platforms to reduce its spread while allowing flexibility in their responses.
Social media feed algorithms are designed to optimize online social engagements for the purpose of maximizing advertising profits, and therefore have an incentive to promote controversial posts including misinformation. By thinking about misinformation as information pollution, we can draw parallels with environmental policy for countering pollution such as carbon taxes. Similar to pollution, a Pigouvian tax on misinformation provides economic incentives for social media companies to control the spread of misinformation more effectively to avoid or reduce their misinformation tax, while preserving some degree of freedom in platforms' response. In this paper, we highlight a bird's eye view of a Pigouvian misinformation tax and discuss the key questions and next steps for implementing such a taxing scheme.