Harari: Taiwan built social algorithms that reward cross-group consensus over outrage
Yuval Noah Harari · Yuval Noah Harari: Stories, Power & Why Truth Doesn't Matter | Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF · Nikhil Kamath · Feb 11, 2026 · at 45:42
Historian Yuval Noah Harari discusses alternative algorithmic structures with host Nikhil Kamath, highlighting Taiwan's digital democracy experiments (such as vTaiwan and Pol.is) designed to bridge polarization.
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“Like you had these models from Taiwan, that they actually built it and it worked well, that you can take the same basic premises of social media and reverse them. You can have the algorithm rewarding content, like the algorithm, first of all, in this Taiwan system, it maps people, according to their views, into clusters of groups. Very easy to do that. And then, that's the key point. When new content is released, it promotes the content, not on the basis of how much engagement it gains, All together, but to the extent that it gains engagement from both sides. If you just cater to one group, you, your content is not promoted. It has to be in some way connecting different groups to be promoted.”
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