  To reduce the spread of misinformation, social media platforms may take
enforcement actions against offending content, such as adding informational
warning labels, reducing distribution, or removing content entirely. However,
both their actions and their inactions have been controversial and plagued by
allegations of partisan bias. When it comes to specific content items,
surprisingly little is known about what ordinary people want the platforms to
do. We provide empirical evidence about a politically balanced panel of lay
raters' preferences for three potential platform actions on 368 news articles.
Our results confirm that on many articles there is a lack of consensus on which
actions to take. We find a clear hierarchy of perceived severity of actions
with a majority of raters wanting informational labels on the most articles and
removal on the fewest. There was no partisan difference in terms of how many
articles deserve platform actions but conservatives did prefer somewhat more
action on content from liberal sources, and vice versa. We also find that
judgments about two holistic properties, misleadingness and harm, could serve
as an effective proxy to determine what actions would be approved by a majority
of raters.
