Related papers: A Pluralist Approach to Democratizing Online Disco…
Many have criticized the centralized and unaccountable governance of prominent online social platforms, leading to renewed interest in platform governance that incorporates multiple centers of power. Decentralization of power can arise…
Designers of online deliberative platforms aim to counter the degrading quality of online debates. Support technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing open avenues for widening the circle of people involved in…
Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…
Online platforms have completely transformed American social life. They have democratized publication, overthrown old gatekeepers, and given ordinary Americans a fresh voice in politics. But the system is beginning to falter. Control over…
The decentralized architecture of Internet sparkled techno-utopian visions of a virtual freedom space for humanity. Peer-to-peer systems, collaborative creation (wikipedia), open source software (Linux), universal shared knowledge, and the…
Polarization is implicated in the erosion of democracy and the progression to violence, which makes the polarization properties of large algorithmic content selection systems (recommender systems) a matter of concern for peace and security.…
We investigate the dynamics of opinion formation on social networking platforms, focusing on how individual opinions, influenced by both social connections and platform algorithms, evolve. We model this process using a differential…
Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved…
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of…
Speaking or writing of political assemblies tends to evoke the action of people gathering to deliberate, or the spaces in which this deliberation might take place. One thing that is often overlooked, however, is the fact that these spaces…
Social media platforms have become critical infrastructures for public communication, where large-scale interaction can both support socially beneficial collective pressure and amplify polarization and conflict. While opinion-dynamics…
Individuals of modern societies share ideas and participate in collective processes within a pervasive, variable, and mostly hidden ecosystem of content filtering technologies that determine what information we see online. Despite the…
Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement net- work, which indicates that users direct their endorsements…
In the wake of increasing political extremism, online platforms have been criticized for contributing to polarization. One line of criticism has focused on echo chambers and the recommended content served to users by these platforms. In…
Recent years have seen an increase in the use of online deliberation platforms (DPs). One of the main objectives of DPs is to enhance democratic participation, by allowing citizens to post, comment, and vote on policy proposals. But in what…
Divisiveness appears to be increasing in much of the world, leading to concern about political violence and a decreasing capacity to collaboratively address large-scale societal challenges. In this working paper we aim to articulate an…
Algorithmic intermediaries govern the digital public sphere through their architectures, amplification algorithms, and moderation practices. In doing so, they shape public communication and distribute attention in ways that were previously…
In this paper, I examine questions surrounding AI neutrality through the prism of existing literature and scholarship about mediation and media pluralism. Such traditions, I argue, provide a valuable theoretical framework for how we should…