What Protests Want, With Yuting Jiang
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Transcript
Welcome to the Radical Exchanges podcast. My name is Jess Scully. I'm the executive director of Radical Exchange. We're a global network and a foundation that deploys technology and creativity in service of expanding community agency, building more resilient democracies, and reimagining markets and ways of sharing. We invite you to join us in a spirit of radical experimentation and radical imagination as we prototype a future we can actually look forward to. In this episode, we're joined by Yuting Jiang from Agora Citizen Network. Yuting is an innovator who's working to bridge division and build consensus amid conflict and polarization. So welcome, Yuting. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Jess, for inviting me. Tell tell me more. Tell me about, you know, your background and about Agora Citizen Network, please.
My name is Yuting. I'm the CEO and cofounder of Agora Citizen Network. It's a, radically re imagined digital town square. Our goal is to rehumanize and depolarize citizen dialogues.
I mean, this is something that is urgent and really necessary in this moment wherein, where social media heightens and and exacerbates, polarization and tribalism. So but you started on Agora Citizen Network a couple of years ago. What inspired the development of the network?
Yeah. So, we started working on this two years ago, and, our starting point was really the observation of how all our major social media were originally designed for entertainment. They were built to, help us keep in touch with friends and, just for having fun in general. So my cofounder and I started thinking about what if we can design something from a to z, for politics, for a place where people cannot only broadcast their messages and, follow influencers, but they can really engage in meaningful discussions at a large scale. So that became the starting point of, Argorum.
And you're inspired as well by the, I suppose, Polis model of of, of deliberation where it's it's not about, pitting people against each other, but maybe finding points of common ground and and points of divergence. Can you explain that a little bit more, please?
Exactly. So we found out about Powless and all the, wonderful experiments that it has run, at city scale, even at nation scale at some in some situations, and it was truly amazing. I read, an interview that, Colin McGill, the founder of Paulus did, where he said, Twitter is great for starting a movement, but it's not great for writing a constitution. So we thought, oh, we need, social media that can do both. So, that's really what convinced us to, extract the, math, the algorithm from POLIS and to apply this model to, Agora.
And, you know, speaking of of starting a revolution, you live in France a lot of the time, and and in France, I I guess, it's one of the places in the world that is most famous for taking to the streets. I mean, the the culture of protests and and political engagement in France is, something that's known around the world, but there's, I guess, a question about about whether that, you know, show of social solidarity or or show of, discomfort, whether that is able to be translated into something more meaningful or even to understand, what people are taking to the streets about. Alright? And and so recently, you ran a really interesting deliberation during France's, Block on two strike. Can you tell us a bit about, the the big strikes that took place and and the context for the deliberation that you ran?
Yeah. So in September, we collaborated with a team of facilitators, called Life Catalyst, and who really wanted to, run a consultation, on the strike called. In English, it means, let's block everything. And that's literally what people wanted to do because they were, really frustrated and upset at the, budget plan that was proposed by the ex prime minister who has since, stepped down. And, so it was really a very, intense moment. It was also kind of felt it felt like the follow-up protest to the yellow vest from pre COVID times. However, during a national poll, the the poll found out that 46 of, French people, they didn't necessarily, support the strike. And, so the facilitators, they really wanted to to understand also, what do people want to propose besides from wanting to block everything. So, basically okay. Except that, okay, we agree that we don't like this budget plan, but what else do we want to propose? So that became the, that became the, the context of this consultation that we run together. And it was truly, an amazing experience. The facilitator experts, Jean Lou and Gaetan, they have been raising awareness of police in France for a few years, and they made a lot of YouTube videos. There, they also wrote books also on this in France. And so we we started collaborating since last summer. So, basically, when we started building Aurora and involving them in the process of, design. And, so this program do experiment that that's that's the first, pilot since, since we launched Agora officially in the summer.
I I think it must be such a a common occurrence, right, where, you know, France has been through, I think, something like five or six prime ministers in the last two or three years, like a a huge moment, of institutional instability, and, at the same time, people expressing this discontent, unhappiness with the budget. But perhaps there's 50 different reasons why people are unhappy with the budget that brings them onto the streets into a into a protest or into a strike. And so through this deliberation process, you're able to put a little bit more depth and detail behind, you know, the the reasons that brought people the people that participate in the deliberation out onto the streets, what what brought them into the strike. And and so you've written about through that process uncovering not not just bipartisan consensus, but, you know, tri partisan consensus and and different, points of agreement and disagreement. Can you explain, what the feedback you got through this process and and what what you're observing through your analysis as well?
Yes. So to set up the consultation, the facilitators, they prepared 20 seat comments from different angles to kick start the the consultation. So when they send that out, participants, they only needed to, vote, agree, disagree, or unsure on these different statements. However, they also had the freedom to add their own statements. Eventually, we collected more than a 100 different statements, from more than 200 participants during this process. So how the tool works is that, it's like policy. By, clustering people who tend to agree, disagree, and similar patterns, we can identify which ideas made them distinct from each other, but also which ideas, bridge them. So this is what we call common ground inside the tool. We want to highlight that, despite the, differences among all these groups, there are some consensus that is established through this process of voting on different, statements.
Yeah. I mean, it it would be, really illuminating, I suppose. When you go to a protest, you assume that the people standing next to you, are there for the same reasons that you're there, but it's maybe only through a process like this that you start to uncover people's unique perspectives and unique reasons for for coming and being a part of a a public, you know, civil movement.
Exact exactly. So what we found out is that the top, consensus agreements, they, they include, for example, to tax the ultra rich. And, also, they call for more transparency in the government. And, however, there are some disagreement in how, radical this, movement should be. And some people, they even call for, the having, like, the sixth republic. And that idea is not shared by everyone in this consultation, so we can really see, the, the the the debris, basically, of the of a reform of change that people want to see. And I think this is normal, especially since, the president Macron dissolved the, national assembly last year. And then, basically, all of the left wing parties had to form a huge collision in order to win majority. And, a lot of these parties, they have they have a lot of disagreements on how things should be done. So even there within one collision, there's still a lot of, conflicts and tension. And I think this consultation also reflected that. But what is important is to also okay. To respect each other's, differences, but also to, highlight that, okay. But there are things that we all share, and let's focus on the things that, that we share.
I mean, that idea of starting from bridging statements and starting from common ground is is so critical. But I suppose when you're in a media dialogue or or landscape, that suggests there's two points of view, you know, two extremes, and you either have to be on one side or the other, you end up with these really simplistic divisions, of of beliefs or or policy preferences. But instead, you map what you describe as the opinion landscape. Can you tell me about how the Agora tool helps to differentiate these different clusters of of, sentiment and, and preferences across the opinion landscape so that it's more than just, you know, left and right.
Yes. So based on how people click on agree, disagree, based on all these votes, the machine learning algorithm, they would, identify clusters of participants who tend to share the same set of beliefs, or, or disagreements. And then, and then we also run a LLM model on top of it to summarize and to give a label to these clusters. And, so it's done in two process. The machine learning is really agnostic to what language that people speak. Is purely based on voting. And then the second part using LLM is to, to just summarize the groups based on their representative opinions and to help help people to, to make sense of what these clusters mean. This is something that we bring to, to policy as well. Because in the original policy, we would have clusters, from two to six different clusters. They both as a, b, c, and d and so on. But here, we really want to have a tool, that is easily understandable for people who don't who don't know about policy and who, well, for whom it's complicated to to make sense of these, statistical data.
Yeah. I mean, that's one one of the things that appeals to me about the platform is that, there is, a way of identifying with the group that you fall into, but also, for me, making sense of other people's perspectives as well. You know? Quite often, there'll be a group that's like the reformers or the reimaginers or there's the, you know, the the people who, are interested in in the traditionalist. So, you know, so it it gives you a way of of putting a handle maybe on the different spectrum of of or the opinion landscape, within an issue. And do you think that helps people does you think it helps enhance dialogue and enable future discussion because people now see that, there is a kind of a a a right or a wrong on an issue or a black or white or left or right. It's it's more nuanced and and kind of more detailed than that.
Yeah. I I I definitely think, it it helps people to see, okay, where everybody stands and where they stand as well. And, for a lot of people, it's also it's also fun. We get the feedback that it's fun that, oh, hey. They our brother says that I'm a reformist here, and they they find out that, that's okay. So what what that means, in the analysis tab of the, app. So that was that was our goal to make this process also as, fun, gamified as possible, although it was designed to be very structured.
Mhmm. Yeah. I I think that's a really fun component and and a a value add that Agora brings to, you know, that foundation of policy that some people might be aware of already is that it is quite playful and, and there's something, very humanizing about seeing yourself as being for the in the instance of this one deliberation as belonging to this kind of thinker or this kind of cohort. So we were inspired, at Radical Xchange by by what you've created at Agora Citizen Network, Citizen Network, and we decided to undertake a deliberation as RadicalxChange, on the on the platform. And so right now, we're inviting the RadicalxChange community to help us on, you know, redefining and reaffirming our shared values as a network. So that consultation is open right now, and I invite anyone who's listening to this to to jump on and play and and help us in that process. So, Yuting, what advice do you have for us as users of the platform? You know, what kind of statements are good seed statements? What are gonna help, what kinds of statements are gonna help us get, the best out of our community or help to to illustrate points of of division or contention?
I I think it's important to have very, diverse seat comments, seat opinions from different perspectives as a way to make people feel included that, you know, that not all the comments, they come from one side, but we try to be as, inclusive as general. And that also inspires others to share new ideas as well. And I think I think Regulatory Exchange has done a great job at providing these, the starting comments. And, and then, what we can do, to expand this consultation is to look at where the, major consensus and where the major diversions is and to perhaps to how to iterate on the, common ground statements taking into consideration of the, the divisive opinions. Or we can also have opinions that try to clarify the divisive parts. So this is, what we did also for the, French, the block cone two, experiment as well. For now, it still takes, it still takes, human effort to make this to for this, process. However, we also hope to have more AI capabilities to suggest new statements, by AI, from the future that people can use and or to, to adapt. So it will be more it would be even more accessible.
Well, I think, what it shows us is that this is the beginning of a process, right, of of teasing out, the way our community feels and what the priorities and values of our community are. So I like that that little piece of homework, really, essentially, that this this deliberation, this consultation is the gateway to the next consultation where we we dive deeper into those statements, you know, where we agree, but also where we diverge, and we we tease through the detail. And that's something that I think is still a human and communal process, as much as we can use the the tools of AI and other platforms to to tease them out.
Yeah. Yeah. It's, essentially a very iterative process because it's a cocreation. It's, to cocreate, something together as a community.
I I love what you've created, and and I really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us, Yuting. I think, there's something really refreshing after, you know, fifteen years, maybe more, of social media that's been so much about pulling us apart and putting us into separate camps, and so much about, broadcast still, and and much less about about engagement and and finding, places where we we agree. Seeing what you're creating and the tools that that you're creating and how you're applying them, gives me a lot of hope. So thank you so much for your work, and thank you for joining us. Thank you so much as well. If you're interested in joining the radical exchange deliberation, go to, Agora Citizen Network, or look at the links, in in the the show notes for this this episode. We would love you to participate in this deliberation on Agora Citizen Network. Thank you for joining us. I'm Jess Scully. Really excited to have you join us on the next episode of Radical Exchanges. Thank you.
