14 Policy Brief No. 22 Toda Peace Institute/Alliance for Peacebuilding understanding that other people share the same grievances, hopes, or ideas. (Tufekci 2018) A 2018 Pew Research study on social media and social activism found abundant examples. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has appeared nearly 30 million times on Twitter to help mark and sort conversations on race, violence and policing. In the first two months after women on Twitter asked each other to post #MeToo to report on sexual harassment and abuse, nearly 2 million people used the hashtag. The Pew report finds that two-thirds of Americans believe that social media plays a vital role in citizen engagement and drawing attention to issues that political leaders need to address. (Pew 2018) Yet the report also finds that a majority believe that online activism results in “slacktivism,” in which less motivated people who might not join a protest in the street could send an email to their political leader or share a Facebook post about an issue from their home. Researchers find that this low-cost and low-risk activism may actually weaken the type of in-person social movement activity necessary to further social goods. (Schumann and Klein 2015) Some note that working-class groups have less access to online social movements. (Schradie 2018) 25. Supporting Crisis Responses, Humanitarian Assistance and Development. Social media technology has an essential role in providing an early warning and responding to human rights emergencies and humanitarian crises due to natural disasters and violent conflict. The United Nations and NGOs are scaling up social media technologies to help people sound the alarm about an impending crisis, and then to coordinate and respond to crises with two-way communication technologies. For example, the International Network of Crisis Mapping works at the intersection of humanitarian crises, new technology, crowd-sourcing, and crisis mappers. 26. Preventing Violence and Hate Speech. Social media platforms can spread information about human rights and dignity to prevent and confront hate speech and threats of violence. Kenyans created the “Ushahidi” social media technology to coordinate efforts to prevent election violence, document voting irregularities, and counter hate speech. (Ushahidi 2017) Ushahidi also functions as a coordination system for humanitarian response. 27. Enhancing Negotiation, Diplomacy, and Peace Processes. Many peace processes designed to end armed conflict end in failure, primarily because of lack of public support. Social media offers new ways to communicate about the tradeoffs and options discussed by high-level diplomats. Researchers found that social media was an important method of communication about the Colombian referendum on the peace process, hypothesizing that social media could have helped to engage the public on various options for ending the armed conflict in Colombia and building public support for the peace plan. (Nigam, et al. 2017)