2 Policy Brief No. 45 Toda Peace Institute Brennan Center for Justice, a US-based law and policy institute, has a resource page that describes racism against Muslim communities as an ongoing problem in US CVE programmes (despite the fact that right-wing and anti-government extremists kill far more people than jihadists in the US, as summarised in this 2015 article from the New York Times). Lisa Schirch of the Toda Peace Institute published a book last year, The Ecology of Violent Extremism, which explores the negative impact of counterterrorism and CVE programmes and offers peacebuilding approaches. The two relevant programmes described below make an effort to work on the threat of white supremacy as well as other extremist movements, and also do not use race as a criterion for identifying threats. 1. The Commons: Depolarising Conversation on Facebook and Twitter This 2018 Medium post is a good place to start learning about The Commons, which is a project of Build Up, an international nonprofit based in the USA. First, they tested a number of strategies for peacebuilding on social media, and now they are scaling the most successful one. They use automation to surface polarised conversations on social media, and they have developed a methodology for human moderators to step into those conversations and depolarise them. Their success metric was whether they could get people to “reflect on the way they were engaging on social media.” This approach requires a great deal of human effort, of course, and that is a potential barrier to scaling the intervention. But at least using automation to find polarised conversations is efficient. It is hard to imagine how a similar approach might have worked before digital media. Build Up’s Helena Puig Larrauri told me that she and her team had a “steeper learning curve” engaging the political right than the left. The organisation did not come out of a politically conservative community, so had to put in extra effort to find facilitators who could engage with conservatives. Larrauri also made the point that the language of “polarisation” is associated with liberal values, and said that talking about “civility” helped with more rightoriented people. As they scale their process, The Commons is running a series of local workshops where they ask about language and wording. The Commons has tested interventions on both Facebook and Twitter, though Larrauri suggests that neither platform is a great container for dialogue. This, of course, is part of why facilitators are needed: They model a type of conversation that the platforms’ affordances do not offer. On the other hand, there are scale advantages to these public conversations, especially on Facebook, where conversations are usually focused around one post with lots of people commenting beneath it. Given this architecture, Larrauri says, lots of people will see the conversation, and so facilitators can shift the entire conversation by setting an example for the group, particularly when engaging with very aggressive people.