Using experimental evidence to design optimal notice and takedown process

Online providers like Facebook or YouTube are expected to enforce the law by removing illegal content, such as copyright infringement or hate speech. This delegated enforcement system is referred to as notice and takedown. Empirically, this scheme leads to many false positives due to over-compliance by providers and under-assertion of rights by affected content creators. We conduct a laboratory experiment to test a mechanism to address this problem. We show that our proposed solution of an independent Alternative Dispute Resolution body significantly reduces over-compliance by providers and improves accuracy of their takedowns, largely thanks to the content creators taking initiative.