Our Mission

It seems as though the partisanship in today’s politics has become extreme - and it affects how we communicate, act, and feel. Combine heated political disagreement with a fractured information economy online, and politics becomes even more frustrating as we are trying to communicate through echo chambers and filter bubbles while also fighting fake news and dark money advertising.

Because people occupy different areas of the internet and are referencing different (sometimes contradictory) sources, we may be slowly losing our common ground of shared facts.

Through the Great American Debate, we’ll be demonstrating the application of advance debate technologies to help sort out what’s fact and what’s fiction in American politics, we believe we can recover our common ground and rediscover our shared values - even if we disagree on our routes forward.

Technology like social media, rabbit holes of fake news, and the algorithmic underpinnings of search engines may have helped silo us into political tribes, but technology can be wielded just as effectively to bring us together again.

Promoting digital and science literacy among the public and increasing access to tools to make research, deliberation, and communication easier is the mission of the Great American Debate.

Will you join us? Meet the team.