Who is Aviv Ovadya?

Open social media and all you seem to see are posts that stoke anger. Have you ever felt that? It happens because many platforms put the posts that get the most reactions at the top. This person has proposed changing that ordering so that what rises to the top is what people who usually disagree both call good.

In short

Aviv Ovadya is the person who in 2022 named, and proposed in a paper, "bridging-based ranking" (a way of ordering social media recommendations so that what rises is not what provokes anger, but what people who usually disagree both call good) [1][2].

Ovadya also advocates "platform democracy", deciding the policies of giant social media platforms through deliberation among citizens chosen by lottery [3], and extends the same idea to the governance of AI [4][5].

Connection to Plurality

Presented in the book. Chapter 5-4 of the book, "Augmented Deliberation", presents Polis, a tool that maps opinions, as "a prominent example of what leading ⿻ technologists Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn call 'collective response systems' and 'bridging systems'", and cites their papers in a footnote [6].

The glossary of the 6-Pack of Care. The glossary of the 6-Pack of Care by Audrey Tang and others describes bridging-based ranking as "an algorithmic approach, named by Aviv Ovadya in 2022, that rewards content earning cross-group endorsement rather than raw engagement", and lists Ovadya's paper in its references [2]. → 6-Pack of Care

Co-authorship. With Tang, Divya Siddarth, Hélène Landemore and others, Ovadya co-wrote the 2024 review "AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares" [7].

Some background. In 2022, Ovadya published the paper "Bridging-Based Ranking" through the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School [1]. In a piece for WIRED, Ovadya wrote of being invited by OpenAI as an outside tester (red team) before the release of GPT-4 [8]. In August 2024, Ovadya announced the launch of the AI & Democracy Foundation [5].

Main ideas

Bridging. Ovadya and Thorburn defined "bridging systems" as systems that increase understanding and trust across divides and create room for productive conflict, deliberation and cooperation. They then treat three things together, social media recommendations, collective response systems and facilitated human deliberation, as systems that each decide where people's attention goes [9][10]. → Bridging

Bridging-based ranking. Instead of ordering by the number of reactions, it raises what gains overlapping support among people who usually disagree. The paper gives Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter; then called Birdwatch) and Polis as examples [1].

Collective response systems. Ovadya's name for systems that put a prompt to a group, gather responses and evaluations, and bring the group's views to the surface. A 2023 paper sets out their structure and principles [11].

Platform democracy. A proposal to decide divisive policies, such as the rules on speech, not by company heads or under pressure from partisan governments, but through deliberation such as citizens' assemblies. It cites the citizens' deliberations on nuclear power policy in South Korea and on abortion in Ireland as examples that worked [3].

Violet teaming. A proposal that, in addition to "red teaming" (probing an AI for weaknesses), the same AI be used to build tools that protect the institutions and public goods it could harm [8].

Governing AI democratically. Ovadya distinguished four meanings in the phrase "democratizing AI": use, development, benefits and governance (co-written with Siddarth and others) [12]. Ovadya has also proposed a framework, "Democracy Levels", that shows in stages how democratic decisions about AI are [4]. → Alignment Assemblies

Further reading

1. Bridging Systems website (English, explainer) — https://bridging.systems/
2. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" (English, book) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/
3. "Platform Democracy: a different way to govern" (English, blog, 2022) — https://reimagine.aviv.me/p/platform-democracy-a-different-way-to-govern
4. "Bridging-Based Ranking" (English, policy paper, 2022) — https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-ranking
5. "Bridging Systems" (English, paper, 2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09976
6. "Reimagining Democracy for AI" (English, paper, Journal of Democracy, 2023) — https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/reimagining-democracy-for-ai/

Sources

1. Aviv Ovadya, "Bridging-Based Ranking" (Belfer Center, 2022) — https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/bridging-based-ranking ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
2. civic.ai, glossary — https://civic.ai/glossary/ ［CC0］
3. Aviv Ovadya, "Towards Platform Democracy" (Belfer Center, 2021) — https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-democracy-policymaking-beyond-corporate-ceos-and-partisan-pressure
4. The "Democracy Levels" framework (2024) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 ［CC BY 4.0］
5. Aviv Ovadya, "AI & Democracy Foundation: founding and hiring" (2024-08) — https://reimagine.aviv.me/p/ai-and-democracy-foundation-founding-and-hiring
6. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］
7. "AI and the Future of Digital Public Squares" (2024) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09988 ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
8. Aviv Ovadya, "Red Teaming Improved GPT-4. Violet Teaming Goes Even Further" (WIRED, 2023) — https://www.wired.com/story/red-teaming-gpt-4-was-valuable-violet-teaming-will-make-it-better/
9. Ovadya and Thorburn, "Bridging Systems" (2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09976
10. Bridging Systems — https://bridging.systems/ ［MIT］
11. Aviv Ovadya, "'Generative CI' Through Collective Response Systems" (2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.00672
12. Seger, Ovadya, Siddarth et al., "Democratising AI: Multiple Meanings" (2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12642 ［CC BY 4.0］