Civil Sanctuary

Social media platforms have the potential to be a great democratizing force, allowing individuals to participate in the free and productive sharing of ideas at a scale never before encountered in human history. 

During emergency situations and times of turmoil, these platforms can provide a crucial forum for discussing time-sensitive, potentially life-saving information. During Department of Defense (DoD) Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HA/DR) operations, relief efforts would benefit from a stable and constructive information environment that naturally facilitates informative dialogue. However, rather than aiding users in finding common ground, online social environments worldwide often fall prey to disinformation, bullying, and malicious rhetoric, which may be perpetuated through broader social dynamics linked to toxic and uncritical group conformity. New technologies are required to preserve and promote the positive factors of engagement in online discourse while minimizing the risk of negative social and psychological impacts emerging from violations of platform community guidelines.

Civil Sanctuary aims to provide technologies capable of supporting DoD humanitarian assistance efforts by facilitating online social environments where positive behavioral norms – those linked to the productive sharing of information, particularly during crises – are encouraged locally in user conversations through the use of multilingual AI moderators. This program will exceed current content moderation capabilities by expanding the moderation paradigm from detection/deletion to proactive, cooperative engagement. 

Extending current research in computational dialogue and cognitive modeling, artificial agents created under this program will learn best practices for online mediation by observing human experts and then employ these skills to interactively guide user groups to adhere to community guidelines. Civil Sanctuary will scale the moderation capability of current platforms, enabling a quicker response to emerging issues and creating a more stable information environment, while simultaneously teaching users more beneficial behaviors that mitigate harmful reactive impulses, including mitigating the uncritical acceptance and amplification of destructive ideas as a means to assert group conformity. 

The program will demonstrate novel and generalizable technologies that commercial platforms may leverage via third-party vendors.

Additional information is available in the Civil Sanctuary Program Announcement.