In an era marked by rapid technological advancements, increasing political polarization, and democratic backsliding, reimagining democracy requires innovative approaches that foster meaningful public engagement. Over the last 30 years, Deliberative Polling has proven to be a successful method of public consultation to enhance civic participation and informed decision-making. In recent years, the implementation of online Deliberative Polling using the AI-assisted Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, a groundbreaking automated platform designed to scale simultaneous and synchronous deliberation efforts to millions, has put deliberative societies within reach. By examining two compelling case studies—Foreign Policy by Canadians and the Metaverse Community Forum—this paper highlights how technology can empower diverse voices, facilitate constructive dialogue, and cultivate a more vibrant democratic process. This paper demonstrates that leveraging technology in deliberation not only enhances public discourse but also paves the way for a more inclusive and participatory democracy.
 

In October 2024, Meta, in collaboration with the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, implemented the third Meta Community Forum. This Community Forum expanded on the October 2023 deliberations regarding Generative AI. For this Community Forum, the participants deliberated on ‘how should AI agents provide proactive, personalized experiences for users?’ and ‘how should AI agents and users interact?’ Since the last Community Forum, the development of Generative AI has moved beyond AI chatbots and users have begun to explore the use of AI agents — a type of AI that can respond to written or verbal prompts by performing actions for you, or on your behalf. And beyond text-generating AI, users have begun to explore multimodal AI, where tools are able to generate content images, videos, and audio as well. The growing landscape of Generative AI raises more questions about users’ preferences when it comes to interacting with AI agents. This Community Forum focused deliberations on how interactive and proactive AI agents should be when engaging with users. Participants considered a variety of tradeoffs regarding consent, transparency, and human-like behaviors of AI agents. These deliberations shed light on what users are thinking now amidst the changing technology landscape in Generative AI.

For this deliberation, nearly 900 participants from five countries: India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey, participated in this deliberative event. The samples of each of these countries were recruited independently, so this Community Forum should be seen as five independent deliberations. In addition, 1,033 persons participated in the control group, where the participants did not deliberate in any discussions; the control group only completed the two surveys, pre and post. The main purpose of the control group is to demonstrate that any changes that occur after deliberation are a result of the deliberative event.

The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home and exporting these technologies abroad. Do these technology transfers help recipient governments expand digital surveillance, impose internet shutdowns, filter the internet, and target repression for online content? We focus on Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications provider, which is partly state-owned and increasingly regarded as an instrument of its foreign policy. Using a global sample and an identification strategy based on generalized synthetic controls, we show that the effect of Huawei transfers depends on preexisting political institutions in recipient countries. In the world’s autocracies, Huawei technology facilitates digital repression. We find no effect in the world’s democracies, which are more likely to have laws that regulate digital privacy, institutions that punish government violations, and vibrant civil societies that step in when institutions come under strain. Most broadly, this article advances a large literature about the geopolitical implications of China’s rise.

We are on the verge of a revolution in public sector decision-making processes, where computers will take over many of the governance tasks previously assigned to human bureaucrats. Governance decisions based on algorithmic information processing are increasing in numbers and scope, contributing to decisions that impact the lives of individual citizens. While significant attention in the recent few years has been devoted to normative discussions on fairness, accountability, and transparency related to algorithmic decision-making based on artificial intelligence, less is known about citizens’ considered views on this issue. To put society in-the-loop, a Deliberative Poll was thus carried out on the topic of using artificial intelligence in the public sector, as a form of in-depth public consultation. The three use cases that were selected for deliberation were refugee reallocation, a welfare-to-work program, and parole. A key finding was that after having acquired more knowledge about the concrete use cases, participants were overall more supportive of using artificial intelligence in the decision processes. The event was set up with a pretest/post-test control group experimental design, and as such, the results offer experimental evidence to extant observational studies showing positive associations between knowledge and support for using artificial intelligence.

The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, in collaboration with Meta and the Behavioral Insights Team, has unveiled the results of the second Meta Community Forum, based on the method of Deliberative Polling. This groundbreaking event engaged 1,545 participants from Brazil, Germany, Spain, and the United States. In each country, it offered the public’s views, both before and after deliberation, about future directions for the development of AI chatbots and how they should interact with humans.

The Deliberative Democracy Lab (DDL) at Stanford University is housed within the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The Crowdsourced Democracy Team (CDT) at Stanford University is housed within the Department of Management Science and Engineering.

Report Contributors (in alphabetical order): Samuel Chang, Estelle Ciesla, Michael Finch, James Fishkin, Lodewijk Gelauff, Ashish Goel, Ricky Hernandez Marquez, Shoaib Mohammed, and Alice Siu.