Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Strategies 5 • Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker co-founded the Social Media and Political Participation Lab at New York University, which “studies the effects of social media on politics.” Their research is detailed here. • At MIT Media Lab, Ethan Zuckerman and his team are building a social media filtering platform called Gobo, which enables users to pull in social media updates from many platforms and gives them very fine-grained control over their filters (an example he gives is that a user could choose to see only posts from non-men). He has a blog post about that here. Since users have such fine-grained control over what filters get applied to their experience on this platform, it could potentially be used to run experiments on how filters shape the experience of digital media users. • At the Center for Media Engagement at UT Austin, Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud and her team have conducted tests relevant to platform affordance design, such as the 2013 experiment described in the policy brief on polarisation research that found a “Respect” button could depolarise digital discourse when compared to the more common “Like” button. (That experiment was published several years before Facebook switched from the “Like” button to six different “emoji reactions,” in 2016.) The rest of the Center’s research is here, though it is more focused on digital journalism than platform design. Strategies Attempted By Digital Platforms Themselves Although no major tech companies list “peacebuilding” among their goals, some are interested in depolarisation. Of course, they are all driven primarily by economic incentives, but some have other goals too — and their values can be genuinely different from each other, which may drive different behaviour. Additionally, whether or not they are interested in peacebuilding, the moral panic of the last few years has driven significant change at the major platforms. Here are some of the things they have tried. 1. Facebook Facebook is the most-discussed company of recent years. They have long had a reputation of “moving fast and breaking things,” even compared to the rest of Silicon Valley. (In fact, the “move fast and break things” slogan was originally a Facebook slogan, though it has become associated with the tech industry in general.) But now that the company routinely affects large-scale civil society and politics, they seem to be working to slow down and show foresight. As with all the internet giants, many people at Facebook are genuinely trying to do good. Many of the problems are genuinely difficult to understand and solve, and many of their lessons could be useful to other (or future) platforms. This policy brief details Facebook’s efforts more closely than those of other companies, because everyone asks about Facebook. While this brief includes some criticisms, these problems are not unique to Facebook.