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Our faculty, students, and staff have had an active presence in the media through articles that have featured our group or our work — ranging from VICE News to The New York Times' coverage of our landmark Science article to a TED Talk with millions of views.

MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication takes aim at the destructive nature of social media

The MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) and the closely affiliated nonprofit Cortico today announced the launch of a broad-based effort that draws on expertise in face-to-face human dialogue, digital networks, and machine learning to develop safe and trusted spaces for meaningful, nonpolarizing human connection and civic impact. This effort has attracted commitments of $21 million from philanthropic individuals and organizations, including a foundational gift from the international nonprofit Project Liberty. Of the total commitments, $8.5 million is directed to research conducted by CCC in collaboration with MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, and the remainder to Cortico.

05.10.2023 | MIT News

Obama praises CCC’s “great work” in “making online conversations more civil and productive”

“We need to figure out how to give [ourselves] a chance to build up civic muscles,” said Barack Obama in his April 2022 speech on disinformation, mentioning th...

Self-Published | 04.21.2022

GBH’s Raney Aronson-Rath Joins MIT Center for Constructive Communication as Journalist-in-Residence

Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, the award-winning PBS investigative documentary series housed at GBH in Boston, has been named...

Self-Published | 02.27.2023

Aroostook County students using AI research to improve their education

Students in Aroostock County want to see a change in how classwork is given because they feel overwhelmed and that their voices aren’t being heard. Central Aroostook...

Bangor Daily News | 02.16.2023

Can Technology Help Humans Listen?

The impact of social media—both positive and negative—demonstrates the great power of the underlying technologies. Technologists can design communication systems t...

MIT Alumni | 09.02.2022

The Internet Needs You-Are-Here Maps

We spend so much of our time online without knowing where we are—or how fragmented we’ve become. Locating ourselves can help us leave our bubble.

...

Wired | 06.08.2022

AI in storytelling: Machines as cocreators

Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016. Set in a dystopian world with mass unemployment, the movie attracted many fans, with one viewer describin...

McKinsey & Company blog | 12.11.2017

Cortico

Our collaborator Cortico, a non-profit founded by CCC leadership, has also been featured in a variety of publications since its launch in 2016.

Meadowview Counts: What’s On Your Mind This Election?

For the 2020 elections, CapRadio is asking people who live, work and worship in one South Sacramento neighborhood — Meadowview — to share their questions and conce...

CapRadio | 09.23.2020

Local Voices Network contributes public input to Madison’s police chief search

As the Police and Fire Commission considers who will be Madison’s next police chief, members of the public will have the chance to weigh in at two upcoming meetings....

The Cap Times | 12.08.2020

‘We weren’t wealthy. But we were rich.’ Black residents of St. Pete reflect on generational wealth

They came together late last year, about a dozen Black residents of St. Petersburg, to talk to each other and to the Tampa Bay Times about generational wealth. Generat...

Tampa Bay Times | 03.25.2021

Electome

Our Electome project -- a machine-driven mapping and analysis of public sphere content and conversation associated with the 2016 presidential election campaign -- informed many analytic pieces written by our news collaborators and by ourselves.


News Collaborations

Trump is all the talk on Twitter in battleground states but the focus on issues ranges widely

A new 15-state SurveyMonkey poll conducted with The Washington Post finds Hillary Clinton with a commanding lead over Donald Trump across battleground states three wee...

The Washington Post | 10.19.2016

How the Orlando attack showed the potential of an October Surprise

Nobody knows what issues will decide the 2016 election, because nobody knows what will happen over the next four and a half months. The things people care and talk abo...

The Washington Post | 06.18.2016

Just how uncivil is Election 2016? MIT’s Media Lab has some charts you should see

We’ve heard a lot of … let’s say, colorful rhetoric this election cycle from US presidential candidates and their supporters.
Now, a team of data scientist...

PRI | 04.29.2016

Self-Published Analysis

The horse race of ideas at the finish line: Tracking the issues Americans did (and didn’t) talk about in the 2016 election

For decades, news coverage of U.S. presidential elections has been focused on the so-called “horse race” — polls, predicted outcomes, fundraising — rather than...

Medium | 11.07.2016

Shooting from the Lip: How a single comment can shift the focus of the election online

Whatever you think of Trump’s now notorious comments, they present a case study in the power of social media to alter the national conversation with astonishing forc...

Medium | 08.19.2016

The Most Widely Shared Election News? Nasty, Brutish and Short …

What makes some election news stories go viral online, and others fall flat? Is it simply due to which presidential candidate has a greater (and more vocal) following?...

Medium | 08.22.2016

CCC Newsletters

CCC Newsletter Issue 1, 03.22

Welcome to the first issue of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication’s newsletter!

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Self-Published | 03.01.2022

CCC Newsletter Issue 2, 04.22

In coordination with MIT’s Values Statement Committee, CCC is launching RealTalk@MIT, a cross-campus pilot program that will solicit honest perspectives from sta...

Self-Published | 04.12.2022

CCC Newsletter Issue 3, 06.22

A Message from Deb Roy, Director: Thoughts on Elon Musk and Twitter // For me, Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter is a wake-up call. It’s a very real remind...

Self-Published | 06.30.2022