Simulating the Effects of Multi-platform Use on Misinformation Diffusion and Countermeasures

The social media ecosystem is highly interconnected.Consequently, efforts to limit the spread of misinformation by individual platforms can have second-order effects on other platforms.This is further complicated by the diversity of moderation mechanisms provided on each platform and the level of multi-platform usage between the platforms.We explore these issues by performing experiments using a previously developed agent-based model of information diffusion between two heterogeneous platforms.By varying the share of users active on both platforms and the types of moderation employed by each platform, we study how multi-platform usage may impact the effectiveness of interventions taken to limit the spread of misinformation in a multi-platform context.We find that interventions taken on platforms with faster rates of content diffusion have a greater impact on the overall diffusion of misinformation, with content removal policies and detection algorithms being more effective than user banning in a multi-platform context.