Truth Bounties: Combating Misinformation Through Economic Incentives;The Struggle to Control X's Community Notes 7 views

How can online platforms establish trustworthy context at scale while preserving open expression? This challenge is both technical and social. It requires systems that judge credibility through distributed communities rather than centralized authority, while resisting capture by partisan interests. Truth Bounties is a web platform that puts financial stakes on claims to verify them. Authors post claims and place monetary escrows on them. Challengers submit evidence disputing claims. Arbitrators render verdicts. When a claim fails arbitration, the author forfeits funds to successful challengers, internalizing the cost of inaccuracy. The system processes real-time updates and broadcasts credibility badges to external platforms. Evaluation measures latency (72-hour target), system reliability (99.9% uptime), throughput (five simultaneous challenges), and human factors including trust and willingness to participate. X's Community Notes is a crowdsourced system that displays notes on tweets when diverse contributors rate them helpful, using a bridging-based ranking algorithm that favors cross-partisan agreement. Using Actor-Network Theory, this analysis asks: Which human and non-human actors enable or constrain Community Notes' production of helpful context, and how do shifting alignments among contributors, algorithms, eligibility rules, external pressure, and interface design reshape which notes become visible? Understanding Community Notes as a contested arena rather than a fixed object reveals why it sometimes dampens misleading content and sometimes fails. Analysis draws on X's program documentation, peer-reviewed studies, journalism, and interviews documenting the system's evolution from the Birdwatch pilot in 2021 through today.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Truth; Bounties; Arbitration

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Jack Davidson STS Advisor: Peter Norton Technical Team Members: Sankalpa Banjade, Chris Cicero, Jimmy Li

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2025-12-13