Beyond Moderation: How AI Facilitation Can Enrich Online Political Dialogue

Can AI facilitation deepen online political discourse and uncover consensus? While prior research has focused on AI moderation for promoting civility and identifying misinformation, the potential of AI to facilitate more substantive discussions remains underexplored. Drawing on research showing that digital conversations often stagnate in superficial or repetitive ex- changes, and on new findings demonstrating AI’s capacity to generate consensus statements, we develop and test a novel intervention called “Dynamic Deliberation” within an online de- liberative platform. In Dynamic Deliberation, AI generates iterative consensus statements for participant voting between rounds of discussion and, critically, proposes targeted focal points for subsequent rounds aimed at refining and extending areas of emerging consensus.

We find that AI facilitation leads to more nuanced and preferred conversations and outcomes among participants, with the strongest effects among participants with the most extreme ini- tial views. These findings point to a promising direction for enhancing the quality of online political discourse while preserving citizen agency in collective decision-making.