Yes, thank you so much. Professor Owen can also speak to this, as the centre he directs is working on youth assemblies, with gen Z.
There are lots of things to be said for citizens' assemblies. They do many things. We've seen them used very successfully in other countries, such as Ireland. We have international research showing that they are another tool in our tool box. There's nothing that is a panacea, but they are a really useful tool for modelling what it means to have democratic discourse.
I talked about contrasting harassment with democratic discourse, meaning that we want people to feel strongly about issues. It's okay if you say a four-letter swear word. In our research, when we look at the data, we've made the innovation of saying we're happy with that. What we don't want is the harassment. We've seen citizens' assemblies be a space in which people come in with sometimes quite fixed views, confusion, etc. It's a space in which they work through that. There's democratic, vigorous, rigorous discourse that can happen, from which you can end up with really interesting consensuses.
It's a way of modelling what we can do. It shows the value of in-person dialogue and meeting over time. I'd say that all of this goes along with what researchers such as John Forester have written about—what makes for a space that's democratic. We need something with repeat engagement, in which people are a community in some way, where it's bounded and they have a common goal. Citizens' assemblies model all of those things, whereas social media models basically none of them. This is why we end up with such different results.