A PUBLIC WHITE PAPER · OCTOBER 2026

Improving social media for democratic discourse

Social media could be designed differently. Explore ideas for a digital public sphere that supports democratic discourse—and add your own.

Read the paper ↓Explore the mechanisms ↓

Fan Cheng, Amirhossein Farzmahdi, Pinyuan Feng, Kedar Garzón Gupta, Trenton Jerde, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Zi Qi Liow, Akihito Maruya, Savannah Smith, Patrick Stinson, JohnMark Taylor. arXiv:2610.10816 ↗

01 / THE PAPER

Read the paper

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This paper brings together ideas for social media that supports democratic discourse, and invites people from different backgrounds to imagine what could be possible.

AUTHORS

Fan Cheng¹ · Amirhossein Farzmahdi¹ · Pinyuan Feng¹ · Kedar Garzón Gupta¹ · Trenton Jerde^2,* · Nikolaus Kriegeskorte^1,* · Zi Qi Liow^1,* · Akihito Maruya¹ · Savannah Smith¹ · Patrick Stinson¹ · JohnMark Taylor¹

¹ Columbia University, New York, USA² Independent Researcher, New York, USA

Authors listed alphabetically. * Corresponding authors: Trenton Jerde, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, and Zi Qi Liow. Publication on arXiv ↗

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02 / THE MECHANISMS

Explore the mechanisms

What would social media look like if it were designed to help us think, understand one another, and deliberate together? Explore the proposals, discover connections, and contribute a new idea.

Select multiple topics to show mechanisms matching any selected topic.

03 / TAKE PART

Contribute an idea

You do not need to work in technology to have a useful idea about how online public spaces could work. Propose a mechanism without choosing a category, using the paper’s table fields: description, promise, challenges, related ideas, and references.

Community suggestions are reviewed before publication. Once approved, they appear clearly identified as community contributions, separate from the original paper.