Gaming the Metric, Not the Harm: Certifying Safety Audits against Strategic Platform Manipulation
Online-safety regulation under the UK Online Safety Act and the EU Digital Services Act increasingly treats scalar metrics as compliance evidence. Once announced, such a metric also becomes an optimization target: a strategic platform can improve its score by routing recommendations through semantically equivalent content variants, without reducing true harm. We ask when such an audit metric can still certify a genuine reduction in harm. The protocol is modeled as a published transformation graph whose connected components form semantic classes, and the metric itself is treated as a security object. Three results follow. First, any metric that scores variants directly is manipulable as so...
| Authors | Florian A. D. Burnat, Brittany I. Davidson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 May 2026 |
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