polarization vs coexistence & cohesion
The simplest way to tell the story of my life is as an ongoing formation through a series of very muscular institutions: family, the Church, an all-boys Catholic school, the Marine Corps, Little League, and my local Fire Department. Each of these institutions had strong norms that facilitated connecting across difference—and, in practice, each of t... See more
Jason Mangone • The paradox of “muscular institutions”
Doing stuff together, especially with people from different backgrounds than our own, is going to be really important for the future of the country. And it’s going to take a set of “muscular institutions”—institutions that aren’t bashful about asserting their prerogatives—to get us there.
The paradox of “muscular institutions”
Local journalism, no matter what form it’s in, truly does contribute to the fabric of a community. You’re not going to find too many large market sources of news reporting on your local city council or the high school basketball scores. Things like that might sound silly to a lot of people but truly are important to small communities... Keeps us ti... See more
Steven Waldman • How high school sports coverage can save democracy - Poynter
Social Media Algorithms Can Shape Affective Polarization via ...
arxiv.orgThere is widespread concern about the negative impacts of social media feed ranking algorithms on political polarization. Leveraging advancements in large language models (LLMs), we develop an approach to re-rank feeds in real-time to test the effects of content that is likely to polarize: expressions of antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (AAPA). In a preregistered 10-day field exper- iment on X/Twitter with 1,256 consented participants, we increase or decrease participants’ exposure to AAPA in their algorithmically curated feeds. We observe more positive outparty feelings when AAPA exposure is decreased and more neg- ative outparty feelings when AAPA exposure is increased. Exposure to AAPA content also results in an immediate increase in negative emotions, such as sadness and anger. The interventions do not significantly impact traditional engagement metrics such as re-post and favorite rates. These findings highlight a potential pathway for developing feed algorithms that mitigate affective polarization by addressing content that undermines the shared values required for a healthy democracy
National service program as a way to bridge
Deliberative Technology: Designing AI and Computational Democracy for Peacebuilding in Highly-Polarized Contexts
The report discusses a workshop focused on utilizing deliberative technologies to enhance democratic processes, promote social cohesion, and address polarization in various global contexts, emphasizing citizen participation and collective intelligence.
toda.orgAs we are fed more content, we are pushed deeper into algorithmic niches. In return, we are encouraged to engage with more extreme and polarizing identifiers because it is more labelable, more indexable by the machine — the creation of the “Island". On this island, the slang, in-jokes, and archetypes which emerge as a community develops in isolatio... See more