MOOD: Massive Open Online Deliberation Platform - A Practical Application

Nowadays, public debates often take place on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter and can be characterized as asynchronous, protracted and ill-structured. The Massive Open Online Deliberation (MOOD) platform aims to structure these debates. Essential is that the platform can differentiate between the moral acceptability and the social acceptance of a debate outcome. We briefly describe the e-deliberation process and look at two existing debate platforms, Liquidfeedback and Debatehub. We design and build a prototype that mainly focuses on: (1) a method to differentiate and validate facts and opinions, and (2) a mechanism that maps both the social acceptance and the moral acceptability of debate outcomes. We research these ethical concepts more in depth and implement several techniques, such as a voting mechanism, in a working prototype that supports a four stage deliberation process. In future applications, machine learning techniques can be integrated in the platform to perform sentiment analysis on a debate.