Imagining Policy That Responds to Polarization's Footprint
All is not well in our digital ecosystem. The social media platforms through which we engage with what is going on in the world are designed to optimise for engagement. This business model underpinning how news and public debate gets prioritised tends to surface inflammatory and divisive content and risks fragmenting users into separate information bubbles. The voices and perspectives that are recommended online are not representative of the spectrum of public opinion but skewed towards polarized, extreme or contrarian positions. Our cognitive bias toward sensationalist content interacts with recommender algorithms to create feedback loops where we see more and more extreme content.
In Episode #3 of Design for Integrity, we connect with Build Up's Helena Puig Larauri, an expert at the intersection of technology, conflict and social cohesion to understand how polarization design and incentives embedded into our digital ecosystems are translating to real world offline consequences, affecting the topics we discuss and how we discuss them with our families, workplaces and communities with implications for on electoral integrity, social cohesion and growing risks of violence.
Design for Integrity is made possible through support from the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion, a global coalition of nonprofits seeking to ask "What if technology fostered trust and collaboration instead of driving polarization and violence?"
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About Helena
Helena is the co-founder of Build Up, a peacebuilding collective with an international reputation for excellence at the intersection of peacebuilding, mediation and technology. Helena mentors, trains and supports hundreds of civil society actors to design and implement technology interventions to peace processes. She has designed and deployed AI-enabled public consultations on peace and conflict issues, interventions to understand and address misinformation, hate speech and polarization, and hybrid online-offline peacebuilding programs. She also led the development of Phoenix, an open-source, AI-enabled, free platform for peacebuilders and mediators to conduct social media listening that now has hundreds of users. Helena has published extensively on these subjects, and is regularly called upon by senior mediators at multi-lateral organisations (e.g. OSCE, AU, UN agencies) to provide advice on how to approach and integrate the use of digital technologies and AI in their work.