We're Hiring
CCC is seeking a student to assist with full stack and/or hardware development to help create AI-mediated social interfaces over the spring semester.
02.13.2026 |
Boston Stories, Unscripted
On the evening of November 10, 2025, more than 150 Bostonians came together with members from the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) for the realtalk@Boston...
01.27.2026 |
CCC Newsletter, Issue 12 (Fall/Winter 2025)
As the US approaches its 250th anniversary, the National Conference on Citizenship is launching an ambitious initiative: the American Conversation Project. The effort see...
12.08.2025 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Reimagining Civil Discourse for the Next Generation
This past summer, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, its closely affiliated non profit, Cortico, and GBH’s FRONTLINE hosted 11 Boston students, ages 16 -21...
10.02.2025 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Discovering the Future of WRAP via realtalk Conversations
In Spring 2025, realtalk@MIT partnered with WRAP (the MIT Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication Program) to support groups of lecturers in reflecting on their...
08.19.2025 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Checking in on realtalk@Boston, one year in
The MIT Center for Constructive Communication, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has been training local community leaders to host facilitated convers...
05.22.2025 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
CCC hosts its second Tech-Enhanced Student Assembly
MIT undergraduates use a Citizens’ Assembly format to draw on their individual values and experiences to offer options for improved sustainability efforts on the MIT ca...
03.31.2025 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
CCC launches a inaugural student advisory board
MIT CCC is launching a student advisory board to help shape its ongoing research as well as student programming via realtalk@MIT. This group of undergraduates will contri...
03.20.2025 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Introducing the Bridging Dictionary
On January 7, CCC launched the Bridging Dictionary (BD), an interactive web-based prototype that uses natural language processing to identify the different ways two media...
12.06.2024 | Andrew Heyward
CCC Newsletter, Issue 8 (Winter 2024)
RealTalk@MIT: Moving Toward a “Listening Campus," Deb Roy article in The Atlantic, Three successful CCC course offerings during MIT IAP
03.06.2024 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
2023 CCC Annual Offsite
Every year, MIT CCC students, staff, and collaborators head to Cape Cod, MA for three days to delve into research discussions and learn, imagine, and share with one anoth...
11.08.2023 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Big Tech's Effect on Democracy | Democracy360
The relationship between technology and democracy has become increasingly complex from the proliferation of social media to recent advances in AI. Kara Swisher moderates...
10.19.2023 | Democracy 360
CCC Newsletter, Issue 7 (Fall 2023)
CCC at Ars Electronica 2023, Josh Flax joins CCC, Five new graduate students, DemocracyNext collaboration, and more.
10.04.2023 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Who Owns the Truth?
When the Ars Electronica festival (September 6 – 10) took a deep dive into examining what “truth” means in today’s world, organizers invited broad participation...
09.05.2023 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
CCC Newsletter, Issue 6
On May 10, CCC hosted its first in-person event: Real Talk, Real Listening, and Trust in the Age of Social Media and Generative AI, New Initiative Announced, Cited on Cap...
06.15.2023 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
CCC Newsletter, Issue 5
FRONTLINE’s Raney Aronson-Rath Joins CCC, Facilitated Conversations at Freeport High in Maine: Making a Difference, Deb Roy on ChatGPT
04.27.2023 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Moving Evidence to Action
Freeport High School, located in a small coastal city in Maine, has an enrollment of 639 students. The socioeconomic and demographic makeup of the student body is diverse...
04.26.2023 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
CCC Newsletter, Issue 4
Martha Minow and Ceasar McDowell on the Constitution, Built-in Inequities, and Where We Go From Here…, Offering Solutions: Local News as an Antidote to Toxic Social Med...
10.25.2022 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
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 that...
09.08.2022 | MIT Alumni
In the Lab: Researchers Work on What's Next in Tech
The latest and greatest technologies often start as projects in university laboratories across the country. Here are a handful of innovations in the works that could tran...
08.08.2022 | Government Technology
CCC Newsletter, Issue 3
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 reminder...
06.30.2022 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Thoughts on Elon Musk and Twitter
It’s not surprising that over the past few months I’ve frequently been asked for my take on Elon Musk’s proposed acquisition of Twitter. After all, for the past dec...
06.28.2022 | Deb Roy
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.
06.13.2022 | Wired
CCC Newsletter, Issue 2
In coordination with MIT's Values Statement Committee, CCC is launching RealTalk@MIT, a cross-campus pilot program that will solicit honest perspectives from staff, stude...
04.13.2022 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
CCC Newsletter, Issue 1
Welcome to the first issue of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication’s newsletter!
03.17.2022 | MIT Center for Constructive Communication
Better democracy through technology
The way we’re speaking with others is fundamentally broken. In every measurable way, things are getting more fractured and polarized.'
For more than two decades, Roy h...
12.17.2021 | MIT Technology Review
What’s Up Holmes? [podcast]
Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free spe...
04.02.2021 | Radiolab
How to Put Out Democracy’s Dumpster Fire
To read the diary of Gustave de Beaumont, the traveling companion of Alexis de Tocqueville, is to understand just how primitive the American wilderness once seemed to vis...
04.01.2021 | The Atlantic
The Local Voices Network | Future of Democracy [video]
We live in an age of social media and polarized broadcast media in which the loudest voices and most extreme opinions — often about issues that are distant from everyda...
03.21.2021 | Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University
We Should All Know Less About Each Other
In 2017, after the shock of Brexit and then Donald Trump’s election, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, set out to study w...
11.13.2020 | New York Times
A Matter of Facts podcast: MIT's Deb Roy on Twitter
In a world with Facebook, Twitter, 24/7 news channels, talk radio, citizen journalism, fake news, real news, audiences are drowning in an overwhelming overload of informa...
10.27.2020 | Delaware Public Media
Listening to Rural and Urban Voices [Podcast]
Opinions about the coronavirus crisis have quickly polarized along partisan and rural/urban lines. But how are Americans experiencing and understanding the crisis? The fa...
05.29.2020 | SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Listen deeper with the Local Voices Network
When the 2016 presidential election left pundits and pollsters stunned over how they could have been so off base about the concerns of rural America, they came looking fo...
12.19.2019 | Madison Magazine
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 describing i...
12.11.2017 | McKinsey & Company blog
Make Jobs Great Again
The next President will face serious questions about the future of work in a technology-driven and increasingly automated economy. Advances in artificial intelligence, ma...
11.04.2016 | Medium
Time to talk about the issues — NOT!
Traditionally the presidential debates are a time for voters to focus on the substance of the campaign and for the nominees to air their differences on policy across a wi...
10.13.2016 | Medium
Speaking of Taxes
Saturday’s New York Times exclusive about Donald Trump’s $916 million tax loss in 1995 and its potential implications for how much federal tax he paid (or didn’t) f...
10.03.2016 | Medium
Gender gap? What gender gap?
Who’s more likely to support Donald Trump on Twitter — men, or women? And what about Hillary Clinton? It turns out that while Clinton’s support is slightly more bal...
09.13.2016 | Medium
The Race Card — Back in Play
After receding to a relatively low simmer earlier this month, Race has boiled up again as a campaign issue, coinciding with Donald Trump’s attempt to reach out to minor...
08.26.2016 | Medium
Twitter Talks Kaine
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s convention speech last night had the Internet abuzz with dad jokes.At the Laboratory for Social Machines, we like to...
07.28.2016 | Medium
Veepstakes Visualized
Lately, it often seems the biggest question on the minds of American voters is who Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will choose as running mates.That’s because one very...
07.06.2016 | Medium
Who’s Influencing Election 2016?
With Super Tuesday just around the corner, we know one thing about this election: it’s the most riveting in years. But why? What makes it so different from everything t...
02.23.2016 | Medium
Time to check your candidate’s “chat-scan"
When Iowans gather in their caucuses tonight, how important will the actual campaign issues be in determining the winners? And which issues in particular?...When I last w...
02.01.2016 | Medium
Enter the Electome
However, at this early moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, the broccoli rule has been suspended. Consumers are gobbling up coverage of how the candidates stand on n...
12.28.2015 | Medium
Twitter Backs New MIT Media Lab Program
Thanks to Twitter, something new is hatching over at the MIT Media Lab.According to MIT News, the California-based social media site saw the potential to do something hug...
10.01.2014 | Boston Magazine