Model and Strategy
Civic Health Project (CHP) advances massively scalable solutions to America's partisan divisions. Drawing on groundbreaking research, and mobilizing resources across the domains of technology, entertainment, and field building, CHP is unlocking mechanisms to overcome the powerful forces that divide Americans, so that our relationships, communities, and country can be resilient and intact against these forces.
In 2024, CHP’s ALGO Solutions (Algorithms and Large Language Models for Good), a new technology incubator, is running three projects to show how to harness generative AI and rewire social media algorithms to detoxify online interactions and overcome division.They apply three different levels of intervention – audience level, commenter level, and platform level – to demonstrate the efficacy and feasibility of intervening at each level.
Project #1: Intervene on the audience watching a toxic conversation online. A team of alumni from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel are building a software platform that empowers volunteers who want to comment constructively in divisive social media threads to do this faster, more scalably, and more effectively based on coaching prompts from a generative AI model. These prosocial comments are designed to influence social media’s vast and largely passive online audiences by (1) raising their awareness of toxicity, (2) shifting their preferences towards lower toxicity, and (3) inspiring them to post their own prosocial content.
Project #2: Intervene on the commenter generating toxic content online. CHP will deploy and compare two complementary interventions that nudge toxic social media commenters towards more prosocial online behavior. The first intervention invites a toxic commenter into a 1:1 Facebook Messenger thread, asking them to share more about the anger or fear their toxic post has just revealed. The second, subsequent intervention offers the toxic commenter an AI chatbot that can help them adapt their future content to be less divisive and better received by others. This project blends two already-available platforms (Amplify.ai and this Duke University AI Chatbot) into a scalable, automated response system. Like Project #1, this effort leverages and applies insights from generative AI about what types of interventions are most effective.
Project #3: Intervene on the social media platform. CHP is building a test platform and dataset to help social media platform providers pinpoint and downrank content that causes demonstrable civic harm. Specifically, the platform measures how accurately the presence of content labeled as harmful by online content classifiers like Google Jigsaw’s Perspectives API and Unite’s Dignity Index, predicts corresponding dangerous shifts in online users’ actual attitudes and behaviors. CHP will prioritize outreach to an initial set of platforms where they have the best combination of API-based and relationship-based access: X (Twitter), Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube.
Impact
Civic Health Project is deeply committed to evaluating what bridge-building and detoxification approaches are likely to yield the best outcomes, and what they are actually achieving when deployed at significant scale. Impact targets for the ALGO Solutions incubated projects are:
Project #1: audience intervention. Based on rapid prototyping, CHP plan to reach and detoxify 1M+ online audience members in 2024, and 50M+ in 2025. A key reason this project can have such a fast impact is because it requires no buy-in from social media platforms, nor even behavioral change from toxic online commenters. The platform will use lab testing, field testing, and proxy measures to track and report on desired audience outcomes.
Project #2: commenter intervention. In 2024, CHP plans to draw >100K frequent, toxic commenters into detoxifying conversations, and to persuade at least 10% of these commenters to install and use the AI chatbot. This project will measure its influence on frequent, highly toxic commenters as follows: (1) frequency of future posts; (2) toxicity of future posts; (3) total number of toxic commenters drawn onto Messenger, and (4) adoption of the AI chatbot.
Project #3: platform intervention. This project’s impact relies on securing cooperation from one or more social platforms. If just one social platform changes its ranking algorithms to incorporate insights from the most highly predictive classifier(s), the prosocial outcomes will be measured in millions of Americans avoiding exposure to content known to cause civic harm.
Civic Health Project has incubated, provided catalytic funding, and/or provided in-kind resources to a number of scalable tech projects, initiatives, and forums, including Chord, The ProSocial Ranking Challenge, Mismatch, and the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion. Other impact highlights include:
Strengthening Democracy Challenge. In partnership with Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab, CHP sponsored and promoted the Strengthening Democracy Challenge to test and compare short online interventions designed to depolarize Americans. Buoyed by the scientific findings of the Challenge, Governor Spencer Cox (R-UT) selected “Disagree Better” as his signature theme for his 2023-24 term as Chair of the National Governors Association. He has since enlisted more than 20 Republican and Democratic governors to participate in the campaign and deliver the “disagree better” message via public service announcements, public forums, and state of the state addresses. In 2024, working with Governor Cox’s team and the National Governors Association, CHP is co-leading a bridging ecosystem initiative to extend this campaign through December 2024 and expand it into a broader cultural phenomenon.
Bridge Entertainment Labs. In 2021, CHP began to spark a conversation across the entertainment industry about how to inspire creative content that simultaneously engages and depolarizes American audiences. Among other successful projects, CHP funded and co-produced The Reunited States, a widely viewed and distributed film selected for 10 prominent film festivals. In 2023, CHP launched Bridge Entertainment Labs, a now- independent entity that collaborates with the Redford Center, the Television Academy, MTV Entertainment Studios, Participant Media, the Grammy Awards, and others to Inspire the entertainment industry to depolarize itself and to foster social cohesion across America’s entertainment audiences.
Leadership
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Kristin Hansen
Co-Founder and Executive Director
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Rob Romero
Co-Founder and General Partner
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Glen Ellingson
Entrepreneur in Residence
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Juan-Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, PhD
Lead Developer
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Sal Arora
Technical Advisor