Implications for Democracy

In modern democracies, issues are aggregated into party platforms, and opinion polls are restricted to questions to which:

• Those in power already know the answer to
• Those in power are ready to hear the answer to
• Those in power benefit from because they are divisive

computational sociology provides new opportunities to understand populations in their own words on the issues they are interested in discussing, while:

• Retaining meaning and coherence lost in comment systems vulnerable to trolling

• Avoiding the problems of 'comment box' systems where thousands of statements are submitted without any sense of who might be speaking for themselves, or for everyone

• Scale systems and exercises of collective intelligence

• Move agenda-setting power to the population

• Disaggregate issues, increasing the signal for each

• See: media coverage

• See: ⚗️ Case studies

• See: https://civichall.org/civicist/beyond-flatland-machine-learning-end-two-party-binary/