The Prosocial Ranking Challenge: Infrastructure, Collaboration, and the Costs of Large-Scale CSS

The Prosocial Ranking Challenge: Infrastructure, Collaboration, and the Costs of Large-Scale CSS

Ceren Budak (School of Information, University of Michigan) presents her research at the inaugural Tech for Open Minds Annual Conference at Duke University on April 2, 2026. Her lecture examines the prosocial ranking challenge — a multi-stakeholder initiative to evaluate whether re-ranking social media content can reduce harm — and gives an honest account of what large-scale collaborative CSS research actually requires: the difficulties of outcome construction, the reliance on toxicity scores, the engineering lift of content filters, and the coordination challenges of working across institutions and platforms.