Policy Brief No.263: Reclaiming Attention: From Digital Conflict to Democratic Dialogue

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This policy brief poses the question: which human capacities does digital polarisation erode, and why does their erosion matter for democratic life? It references a comprehensive governance architecture developed by Toda Peace Institute, Lisa Schirch’s 'Blueprint for Prosocial Tech Design Governance and Social Media Impacts on Conflict and Democracy', which addresses the dynamics of digital polarisation threatening democratic governance and establishes policy frameworks, regulatory mechanisms, and design interventions for constraining platform harms. Drawing on Simone Weil’s analysis of attention, affliction, and uprootedness, the brief offers a theory of democratic capacity that clarifies what platform governance must protect and concludes with four policy actions that ground platform accountability in the democratic capacities it must preserve