Motivation & Overview

As language technologies become more powerful and pervasive, they are increasingly shaping how democracies function—and how they falter.

In recent years, NLP and computational social science have helped us understand how political language influences public opinion and policy. Researchers have analyzed how politicians and the media use rhetoric to shape narratives, and how citizens express attitudes toward policies, parties, and social movements on social media. NLP has also been used to detect threats to democracy, such as extremism, disinformation, propaganda, censorship, and suppression.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), we are entering a new phase. LLMs promise to reshape how we study political text and how we design systems to support democratic engagement. A particularly exciting frontier is deliberation—the process by which people engage in thoughtful dialogue to solve problems, share perspectives, and make collective decisions. LLMs have shown early promise in improving conversations between people with opposing political views and even in reducing belief in conspiracy theories. These developments open up possibilities for building tools that support more inclusive, informed, and respectful public discourse.

Several of our invited talks will focus on the role LLMs might play in enhancing civic dialogue, facilitating deliberation in diverse communities, and making democratic decision-making more accessible.

At the same time, these technologies pose serious risks. LLMs can be used to produce highly persuasive disinformation, manipulate public narratives, and erode trust in democratic institutions. Governments and tech companies alike are experimenting with AI in ways that raise concerns about surveillance, censorship, and political bias. Already, real-world actors have deployed AI to monitor political opponents, spread fabricated content, and influence elections.