Social Media Impacts on Conflict and Democracy

The Techtonic Shift

Lisa Schirch, Lisa Schirch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social media technology is having a dramatic impact on social and political dynamics around the world.

The contributors to this book document and illustrate this "techtonic" shift on violent conflict and democratic processes. They present vivid examples and case studies from countries in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America as well as Northern Ireland. Each author maps an array of peacebuilding solutions to social media threats, including coordinated action by civil society, governments and tech companies to protect human minds, relationships and institutions. Solutions presented include inoculating society with a new digital literacy agenda, designing technology for positive social impacts, and regulating technology to prohibit the worst behaviours.

A must-read both for political scientists and policymakers trying to understand the impact of social media, and media studies scholars looking for a global perspective.

1 The techtonic shift

How social media works

Lisa Schirch

This book tours the world to spotlight how social media technology both benefits and harms society. The case studies in this volume give vivid illustrations of how the quality and content of information we consume on social media influences the quality of democracy and the methods people use to manage conflict.

Social media platforms include, for example US-based Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube, and China-based WeChat, Weibo and TikTok. Media is, as its Latin root suggests, “in the middle”; it is a channel for communication between people. Social media can be used to wage war or build peace. Like radio, television and print, it can be used for good and evil.

Social media technology (tech) has created a tectonic shift—or a “techtonic” shift—in how people receive information and communicate with others. This book begins with a nuts and bolts overview of how social media works. Unlike other communication technologies, the economic model of major social media platforms is built on a profit model that rewards false and emotional information and undermines fact-based journalism. Harms are baked into economic models of the major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

This chapter describes the economic model of surveillance capitalism which monetises private data, harnesses the addiction-prone attention economy where social media platforms aim to keep users online and relies on algorithms to show us content that will emotionally arouse us and reinforce the worst aspects of humanity. Chapter 2 summarises how information shared on social media influences democracy and conflict. It describes information disorders and presents a framework for conceptualising a spectrum of types of polarisation. Next, 13 case studies from countries across the globe provide vivid details of how social media is impacting peace and polarisation, democracy and demagoguery. A final chapter presents a peacebuilding approach to addressing social media threats, with a set of recommendations for governments, tech companies and civil society.

Weighing social media impacts

Techno optimism pervaded the early years of social media, with the Arab Spring signalling hope that these new technologies would bolster democracy movements and boost citizen journalism documenting corruption and attacks on human rights. But by the mid-2010s, newspapers began carrying alarming stories of the impact of social media on privacy violations, addiction, social isolation and depression. Researchers began documenting the impact of social media filter bubbles, information disorders, polarisation, democratic backsliding and dangerous speech. It became clear that social media was playing a role in undermining democratic elections around the world and was contributing to violence and even genocide in places like Myanmar. Violent extremist groups like ISIS and white supremacists were successfully recruiting on social media. And ordinary people were participating in spreading false information and conspiracies. Facebook’s early motto to “move fast and break things” was a harbinger that this youthful social media platform can indeed break things—big things like democracy and peace. By 2020, there is a growing consensus that social media platforms are reshaping relationships in profound ways—a “techtonic” shift.

Over the last 20 years, researchers are piecing together a complicated story of social media’s impact on conflict and democracy. Social media usage around the world continues to expand, with half the people on the planet using social media (Kemp 2020). While the number of democracies was expanding in the late 1900s and early 2000s, since 2005 there has been a steady democratic backsliding in every region of the world (Repucci 2020). The decline in democracy continues even though social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter promise a more “connected” world and despite the expanding use of social media for civic engagement (Anderson et al. 2018). In the same time period, there has been growing political polarisation in countries in every region (Carothers and O’Donahue 2019) By the mid-2010s, evidence was mounting of escalating information disorders, including false and misleading news stories and conspiracies, amplified by social media, contributing to an increasingly polluted information ecosystem (Wardle 2019). And around the globe, research indicates declining public trust in professional news journalism (Newman et al. 2020).

In their book on Liberation Technology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy, Diamond and Plattner describe the internet as “a “cyberstew”, a widely divergent mix of actors and motives, where “liberation and control, transparency and deception, cooperation and predation, tolerance and extremism all vie with one another” both to “boost democracy” and “enable repression” (Diamond and Plattner 2012, xiii). The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) in San Francisco grew out of tech insiders’ concerns for the impacts of technology on humanity. These tech insiders, the people working at technology companies, first rang the alarm bell to raise awareness of tech harms. CHT publishes a technology “Ledger of Harms”, drawing on the concept of a bank ledger with assets and liabilities, expenses and profits (Center for Humane Technology 2020).

Like the techno-optimist and techno-pessimist scale illustrated in what follows, this book weighs the benefits and costs of social media technology. Techno-optimists and techno-pessimists cite a litany of pros and cons of social media. The scales seem to tilt towards more harm than good, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. While social media technology has increased information access, empowered democracy activists and expanded freedom of speech, governments are using social media to surveil and repress citizens, and social media has become a superhighway spreading disinformation. And polarising and violent extremist messages are prevalent across social media. The scales of evidence about social media seem tilted towards destruction at a moment in history that coincides with the climate crisis bringing devastating fires, floods, droughts, famines and storms; a global pandemic accompanied by an economic recession; and democratic backsliding.

Figure 1.1 Weighing Techno-optimism and Techno-pessimism

Research methodology

Most of the research on the impacts of social media on conflict and democracy focus on the United States or Western Europe. A 2018 research review commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation on “Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation” found a lack of comparative research on the relationship between disinformation and political polarisation and the quality of democracy in other countries (Tucker et al. 2018, 61). This book aims to address that gap.

In 2018, the Toda Peace Institute, based in Tokyo, commissioned 13 local scholars and journalists to write case studies describing the positive and negative impacts of social media on their local context. Aiming to gather insights outside of North America or Western Europe, the case studies include three from South America, three from Africa, six from Asia and the Middle East and Northern Ireland. The countries include a variety of different types of governments and social challenges in terms of conflict and participatory democracy. Instead of attempting to use big data, this exploratory research methodology provides portraits and local narratives. Exploratory research aims to map the terrain of the problem to understand how to prioritise and design future research.

Authors were asked to provide examples of how civil society, government or other actors were using social media and to describe the impact social media technology was having on polarisation, social cohesion, conflict, and democracy. Research questions included: What is the range of positive and negative impacts related to digital communication? What is the range of interventions from civil society, tech companies, legacy media and governments that can help address the impact of technology on conflict dynamics? Due to the increasing awareness of digitally transmitted disinformation and hate speech, authors were asked to offer specific examples of disinformation and hate speech and to describe how these features impacted society.

This research conforms to other scholarship on this issue. For while there are dozens of new books analysing social media impacts on society, few offer hard evidence of direct causation. Anecdotes of social media harm are not evidence of causation. Recognising there is a complex relationship—not a direct causal link—between social media technology, democracy and conflict dynamics, researchers were given a wide scope to define the key social media issues in their countries. In each country-based case study, social media technology is situated in a unique context with a distinct history of state-society relationships, a distinct legal context and framework, unique social divisions within society over religion, ethnicity, class, etc. and a distinct media landscape.

As detailed in Chapter 2, polarisation and democratic backsliding have a variety of causes and were evident before the advent of social media. Social media is not the sole “cause” of problems like disinformation, polarisation, conflict or violence. Researchers were asked to explore potential patterns within their country. At a workshop that included the researchers and 20 other scholars, the group explored common patterns and themes across the case studies. Chapter 2 identifies these themes and Chapter 16 identifies key recommendations to address these in the final chapter of the book.

Information ecosystems and information disorders

Understanding the impact of social media on conflict and democracy requires an analysis of the changes in the broader information ecosystem. Information ecosystems are networks of information producers, information channels (including legacy media and social media), information curators, consumers and sharers. The case studies in this book illustrate shifts in information ecosystems around the world as social media platforms usage increases.

The research in this book, and wider scholarship, suggests that social media infuses media ecosystems with more information, more partisan information and more false and misleading information. In 2020, the Pew Research Center found one in five Americans relied primarily on social media for their news. And of this group, those surveyed were less knowledgeable and had more exposure to conspiracies (Mitchell et al. 2020). Given that social media platforms are largely not required to play the editor role to verify information, it has become easier for the makers of conspiracies and falsehoods to pollute the information ecosystem with poisonous and partisan ideas. To understand this shift towards getting news via social media, it is important to understand the wider information ecosystem.

“Legacy media” refers to newspapers, magazines, radio and television modes of communication that are primarily one-way, with news editors making decisions about what news will be delivered to the public. In legacy media, news journalists report, investigate and analyse information. Social media platforms are not news producers. They do not pay journalists to produce information. Rather, they make it possible for anyone to produce and share information.

In legacy media, news editors decide which stories to distribute. News editing ensures that someone is accountable for distributing true information, as editors can face legal consequences for selling false news. On social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, current laws, in most countries, do not require these platforms to counter false information, meaning no one can be held legally liable for distributing false information.

Legacy media operates on a model based on corporate, government or public funding. State-controlled media refers to authoritarian governments limiting and shaping public information, largely to serve state interests. Publicly funded media produce news in public interest. Examples include the BBC in the UK and NPR and PBS in the U.S. Corporate-owned media produces news is paid for by corporate sponsors, advertisers and subscribers, and it aims to reflect corporate interests and public demand for information. Most legacy media are corporate-owned. They profit by selling ads. Ad revenue goes towards hiring more professional journalists to investigate news stories that go beyond simply repeating government announcements. This revenue structure enabled small towns to have their own newspapers.

In each of these three models, there is a media owner and editor who serve as “gatekeepers” that determine what information the public receives. Journalists are commissioned or submit stories for review by editors, who are controlled or influenced by state, public or corporate motives. The public demand for programming is also reflected in each model. Advertisers place ads on popular media.

Figure 1.2 illustrates how media owners and editors serve as gatekeepers to information produced by journalists. In legacy media, the public has limited opportunity to provide their own stories or perspectives. This limits democratic expression. On the positive side, editors are responsible for ensuring the veracity of the ...