Policy Briefs on Social Media, Technology and Peacebuilding

This report examines how deliberative technologies can restructure climate negotiation architecture to enable multi-issue, mutually beneficial agreements that can be simultaneously implemented without undermining relative competitiveness. Using a Smartsettle Infinity simulation of an alternative global climate negotiation architecture, the report demonstrates how private preference modelling, structured trade-offs, and optimisation algorithms can generate Pareto-superior policy packages at the global scale. The contribution lies in illustrating a deliberative decision-support architecture capable of identifying coordinated, politically viable outcome packages under realistic strategic constraints. The findings point toward new pathways for coupling deliberative negotiation technology with citizen-driven political mobilisation to strengthen global climate governance.

This report examines a deep institutional problem exposed by the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol: Congress lacks modern capacity to hear, process, and act on authentic civic voice. Drawing on more than 100 interviews with congressional staff, this paper examines how deliberative technologies can help modernize Congress. Distinguishing civic tech from deliberative tech, it highlights models which structure public testimony into usable legislative insight. The paper argues that Congress’ unresponsiveness is less a failure of will than of infrastructure. When aligned with modernization efforts, deliberative technology offers a practical path to revive assembly and petition as meaningful inputs to representative governing.

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

Deliberative technologies are software tools that help create large-scale dialogue among participants. This article outlines the experience of testing four of these tools—Crowdsmart, Pol.is, Talk to the City, and Deliberation.io—with a group of student volunteers to understand their function and effectiveness, and to identify digital facilitation strategies. The paper concludes with recommendations to make deliberative tools more accessible in the future to enable collective decision-making. Common Good AI, a US-based nonprofit organization, created this programme to support its mission to foster inclusive civic engagement and social cohesion. The organization aims to transform how communities find common ground and solve problems together.

This paper explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), as an emerging tool to address the proliferation of online toxic speech. The research focuses on two key applications of LLMs: hate speech classification and detection, and response generation, specifically the use of LLMs for creating counterspeech. While LLMs show significant advances in detecting hate speech through various models, including supervised, unsupervised, and GenAI-based approaches, the paper notes crucial limitations. These include the difficulty in processing the nuance and context of online communication, understanding implicit hate speech, and the significant issue of models learning and amplifying human biases present in training data. The paper reviews efforts to develop AI-powered counterspeech tools, including challenges in generating human-like, constructive responses that adequately engage with specific hateful content. The paper suggests that LLMs show promise in developing counterspeech tools, and closes with a set of recommendations for technology developers and governments to guide the ethical development and deployment of LLMs in addressing online harms.