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New research shows that massive spending on toxic content moderation fails to address polarization—social media companies should instead design better platforms that give users more control and choice.
In this article, we present research findings from a participatory media production project. The project is part of a transdisciplinary AI Lab and a citizen-science initiative, intended to test the transformative potential of new platforms to mediate political deliberation about contentious issues like religion, sexuality, and migration. We aimed to assess whether our remodeled version of Pol.is, “a real-time platform for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words,” is able to redress the blindspots of content moderation policies in an effort to “combat” toxic polarization. The rationale of this pilot study stemmed from the observation that current policies emphasize what we call the ‘subordinate’ view of platform mediatization and fail to address the audience logic, or the ‘instrumental’ view. Our approach, the participatory ‘re-mediatization’ approach, blended both views of mediatization as a heuristic tool to facilitate the desired kind of productive polarization through the “re-mediatization” of public opinion. We show that participatory media production in the domain of governance and decision making, in our case the participatory production of opinion visualizations, allows for discussion management practices that may steer platforms of dialogue away from toxic polarization and towards productive polarization or even creative relating. We conclude by suggesting that our participatory re-mediatization approach is a promising addition to the policymaking toolbox to facilitate productively polarized, local decision making.
We aimed to assess whether our remodeled version of Pol.is, “a real-time platform for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words,” is able to redress the blindspots of content moderation policies in an effort to “combat” toxic polarization. In this normative project bent on political transformation, we hope that providing these alternatives creates avenues to renegotiate entire ways of living and encourages more desired kinds of polarization about topics with much moral baggage, such as religion, sexuality, and migration. First, an introductory talk was held by TP on the aims and reasoning behind the mediatized histories project, the choice of the politically and historically contentious issues of religion, immigration and sexuality and our action-research goal by means of testing the Pol.is tool within a local context.
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