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Toggle navigation Login Toggle navigation Home Home JavaScript is disabled forand practiced behaviors. Altering tech design through the use of goal setting, nudges, gamification, and in-group priming allows for repeatable behaviors to be practiced and modified. Shifting from a focus on policies for content moderation to a focus on users’ choices within online interactions—and deeper consideration for how designs affect users’ options, choices, and agency—allows us to capitalize on insights from moral psychology and education to see new ways forward in combatting incivility in online contexts. In the American Tempest: Democracy, Conspiracy, and Machine Biagetti, Samuel ( Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities , 2023 ) No one can be certain precisely what democracy” is, but everyone seems to agree that it is in danger. Since the beginning of the pandemic, warnings of toxicity,” vitriol,” and other ill humors infecting the body politic have invaded mass media and political discourse, while the foundations of our civic order—truth,” facts,” and civility”—have been seen to erode to the point of collapse. Although the exact cause of the present rupture in the social and epistemic fabric is hard to pinpoint, many observers seem to agree that the internet is to blame. Online algorithms are found to spread misinformation” and disinformation,” while anointed experts attribute unexpected outcomes of public events, from election results to the verdicts in defamation suits, to online campaigns by malicious bots.” A New York Times opinion piece from June 2021 warned readers against examining or analyzing claims found online, since the impulse towards curiosity allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us.” The atmosphere of confusion and distrust not only pervades public discourse in the English-speaking world, but increasingly spills beyond it; the phrase fake news” has entered, untranslated, into political discourse in France, where a law criminalizing false statements online fuels an acrimonious debate. The Case for Designing Tech for Social Cohesion: The Limits of Content Moderation and Tech Regulation Schirch, Lisa ( Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities , 2023 ) Based on nearly 60 interviews with staff at tech companies, critics of big tech, civil society groups impacted by tech-amplified social media, and new tech startups, research revealed three distinct but complementary narratives or approaches to thinking about polarization and social cohesion in digital spaces. The User-Centered” Narrative describes harmful content online as generated by users, with social media products and search engines acting as a mirror of society. Several interviewees described the defeating feeling of playing whack a mole” against the growing tide of individual and state-sponsored industrialized harmful digital content. This narrative points to the need for content moderation on user-generated content and digital media literacy to help the public navigate information and communication on the internet. The Tech Design Regulation” Narrative describes harmful content as amplified by tech product designs including the affordances and algorithms that are optimized for user engagement, advertising, and shareholder profit. Many social media companies optimize their product designs for user engagement to maximize their ad-based profits. Machine learning algorithms promote emotionally alarming and divisive content which tends to garner more attention, just as cars slow down driving past a car accident and as news outlets use the if it bleeds, it leads” principle to prioritize alarming news. From this point of view, some tech products incentivize harmful content that drives toxic polarization. This narrative presses for government regulation to extend beyond privacy to regulating tech profit models, algorithms, affordances, and designs that amplify toxic content. The Social Cohesion by Design” Narrative describes tech products that amplify and scale social cohesion by designing affordances and algorithms optimized for these purposes. These digital products can support human agency to participate in civic action, bridge divided communities, and build trust between the public and institutions. The first half of this article provides explores the complex relationship between toxic polarization and digital spaces and analyzes these three frames or paradigms for understanding the role of digital spaces in toxic polarization. The second half of the paper focuses on examples and case studies of social cohesion by design” also known as "peacetech." Parents in Fact Nejaime, Douglas ( University of Chicago Law Review , 2024 ) The Restatement of Children and the Law, protects a child’s relationship with a "de facto parent"a person who has "established a bonded and dependent relationship with the child that is parental in nature." De facto parent doctrines are part of a broader category of functional parent doctrines that extend parental rights to an individual who has developed a parent-child relationship and acted as a parent to the child. Application of the de facto parent doctrine depends on a conclusion that the person formed a parental relationship, and yet debate remains over whether the person is a parent or merely a third-party nonparent. This Essay examines the Restatement’s full-throated embrace of a de facto parent doctrinean immensely important developmentin the context of family law’s evolving treatment of functional parents. In the past, family law generally cast functional parents as nonparents. For example, a 1995 state court decision, on which the Restatement relies, treated a de facto parent as a third party entitled merely to visitation with the child she had raised. More recently, family law has grown to see functional parents as parents. Common law doctrines have regarded de facto parents as entitled to the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, and a growing number of states have adopted statutory provisions that treat functional parents as legal parents. The Restatement’s approach to de facto parents reflects these developments. Even as the Restatement begins by locating de facto parents in a framework designed around conflicts between legal parents and third parties, it distinguishes de facto parents in ways that render them, both conceptually and legally, like parents. Indeed, the Restatement pushes well beyond the American Law Institute’s earlier endorsement of a de facto parent doctrinethe 2002 Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, which recognized de facto parents but consigned them to an inferior legal status. After situating the Restatement’s approach to de facto parents within broader family law developments, this Essay explores how the evolving status of functional parentsfrom nonparent to parentmatters to constitutional understandings of the parent-child relationship. To account for the fundamental right of parents to direct their children’s upbringing, including by excluding third parties, the Restatement requires a de facto parent to show that "a parent consented to and fostered the formation of the parent-child relationship between the individual and the child." This consent-based approach to de facto parenthood proceeds from an assumption that a functional parent is a third party who, based not only on their conduct but also on the conduct of an existing legal parent, can transcend that third-party status. Yet, seeing de facto parents as parents prompts skepticism of this constitutionally grounded consent requirement. Such skepticism is reflected in law, as courts have resisted a restrictive application of the requirement, and newly enacted statutory doctrines have explicitly softened the requirement. Further, the fact that other functional parent doctrines, including those that yield legal parentage, do not expressly require parental consent suggests that consent is not a constitutional...