Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance

Bridging Systems (Ovadya, Thorburn, 2023) are designed to increase mutual understanding and trust across divides, creating space for productive conflict, deliberation, or cooperation. The paper examines these systems across recommender systems, collective response systems, and human-facilitated deliberation, proposing understanding them as attention-allocation processes. This interdisciplinary approach addresses how algorithmic systems mediating communication can be redesigned to promote bridging rather than amplification of divisions.