Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Strategies 13 Despite the use of the debunked echo chamber argument, the researchers are trying to include harassment in their assessment. The description for the first proposal notes that the group already “found that while incivility, which breaks norms of politeness, can be problematic, it can also serve important functions in political dialog. In contrast, intolerant discourse — such as hate speech, racism, and xenophobia — is inherently threatening to democracy. The team will therefore work on developing algorithms that distinguish between these two behaviours.” It is true that Twitter serves a unique function in modern public discourse, so hopefully this research will help them do that better. In mid-2019, Twitter also released an app, “twttr,” where it publicly experiments with different affordances. Twitter gave Buzzfeed News reporter Nicole Nguyen access to the twttr team, and she wrote up their process. In doing this, Twitter is arguably following in the footsteps of Reddit, which gave extensive behind-the-scenes access to another reporter in 2018 and thereby raised the bar on platform transparency (more about this below). Regarding other platforms: Amazon is worth a mention because the public trusts it enormously, and it controls the movement of both information and goods. The survey that found Google to be less trusted by Republicans than Democrats also found that Amazon is one of the most trusted across the US, by both parties. Yet Amazon can and does remotely delete books from users’ Kindles, and experiments with which books it allows users to see. And Amazon’s empire does not end at consumer sales — it owns the server space that powers almost half the internet, as documented by Vox. That places Amazon in an infrastructure role. It is worth thinking about how much the public should trust it. Reddit, too, is worth a mention. It is firmly among the most-used websites on the Internet. As of this writing in March 2019, it is the sixth most-visited website in the U.S. according to Alexa’s real-time rankings — that is after Google, Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipedia, and before Twitter. Yet Reddit attracts remarkably little attention despite its impact. An important difference between Reddit and the other major platforms is that its structure depends on volunteer moderators, who shoulder an immense amount of work to manage conversation on Reddit. There is more about the platform’s history and values in this 2019 video interview with CEO Steve Huffman, which includes commentary on Reddit policies like the platform’s continued proud support for pseudonyms. In 2018, Reddit took the unprecedented step of giving New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz access to its internal moderation meetings, including all the company snacks and awkward decision-making. No other platform company has been willing to risk such transparency. (As Marantz wrote in the article, “I asked a few social-media executives to talk to me about all this. I didn’t expect definitive answers, I told them; I just wanted to hear them think through the questions. Unsurprisingly, no one jumped at the chance. Twitter mostly ignored my e-mails. Snapchat’s P.R. representatives had breakfast with me once, then ignored my e-mails. Facebook’s representatives talked to me for weeks, asking precise, intelligent questions, before they started to ignore my e-mails.”) Reddit’s transparency was both admirable and, in some sense, risky: The reporter was present when Reddit employees learned that, although they had just banned a forum called