Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Strategies 9 It is not clear whether Facebook has implemented a version of viral slowdown on Facebook itself. The dynamics of Facebook’s Newsfeed are less visible because of its black-box algorithm, so they may have tested or implemented viral slowdowns there, or they may not. Affordance redesigns In 2016, Facebook officially switched from the “Like” button to six different “emoji reactions.” Reportedly, the feature was driven by users who wanted to be able to express emotions like “Love” or “Sadness” when a Facebook friend posted about a death in the family, as opposed to a “Like.” However, in a 2017 Forbes article, Amit Chowdhry reported that the different emoji reactions are weighted differently in the Facebook Newsfeed, meaning that different reactions affect which conversations are visible to users. And outside research by Stroud et al. has shown that changing the available reaction buttons can affect the polarisation of a digital conversation. It is almost impossible for outside observers to know what is happening with Facebook’s affordance experiments because almost none of the data is public. But we do know that every major tech company runs (literally) thousands of experiments on how affordances affect user behaviour. If polarisation or peacebuilding are priorities at Facebook right now, then they are now experimenting to figure out how affordances can depolarise or build peace. 2. Google and Youtube (owned by Alphabet) In recent years, Google and Youtube’s impact on society have been less examined and debated than Facebook’s. But — at least in the US — both Google and Youtube are the only websites on the open Internet more visited than Facebook. They are also far more trusted than Facebook. A 2018 survey by data company Jebbit, profiled in the marketing trade publication Adweek, found that of 100 major consumerfacing brands, Facebook was least trusted in the US while Google was the third most trusted (after Amazon, second most trusted, and Visa). This got backed up by a separate survey conducted by Georgetown and New York University, described in Vox — Facebook was still last. (That survey also found that Google is less trusted by Republicans than Democrats.) Google’s original slogan was “Don’t be evil” (though the company stopped emphasising that slogan a few years ago). Some critics say that consumers still largely trust the company due to an internal culture of foresight and care. One article by Lily Hay Newman in Wired describes an early “privacy summit” that took place at Google in 2009, during which Google employees worked to anticipate future privacy issues and to build better tools to honour users’ privacy. Newman then documents the summit’s impact and the company’s privacyhonouring culture over the next ten years. (On the other hand, Newman points out that Google’s business model — which, like Facebook, is advertising — has still pushed them towards privacy missteps.) Have these different company cultures resulted in different societal impacts? Google appears to be ahead of Facebook on some problems; for instance, while Youtube has many of the same content moderation issues as Facebook, Youtube’s moderation guidelines were always public, whereas Facebook only made its public last year after significant public