Lisa Schirch Social Media Impacts on Social & Political Goods 5 peacebuilders, including the sponsors of this report, have special training and practical experience in designing intergroup processes to address conflict, orchestrating complex peace processes, and community organizing. Conflict transformation analysis and skills could help to reform social media platforms so that they build empathy and enable dialogue and deliberation, social cohesion, and cross-cutting relationships on social media. D. Conduct “Do No Harm” and Conflict Sensitivity Assessments Social media platforms are responsible for unintentional harms that occur as a result of the design and algorithms on its products. Other organizations that create unintended harms, including the fields of medicine, humanitarian assistance, and peacebuilding, as well as the military, invest significant resources in assessment and planning to avoid unintended consequences. Conflict sensitivity is the use of assessment tools to analyze the local context (such as the country in which a social media platform operates) to anticipate ways the platform may be abused or contribute to social divisions or violence within that context. Social media companies can use conflict assessment tools to advance their capacity for conflict sensitivity and design their services to minimize harm with knowledge of the local context. (Schirch 2014) There are conflict transformation and peacebuilding organizations operating in nearly every country in the world that could work with social media organizations to carry out such assessments. E. Coordinate Support for Fact Checking and Hate Monitoring When does fact-checking happen? Who does it? How do they do it? The truth needs staff. Facebook already has nearly 20,000 contractors attempting to review and respond to complaints of hate speech and fake news. But often these contractors sit in tiny offices in other countries and only have 3-5 seconds to decide whether a post or comment stays or is deleted. (Chen 2014) Fact checking is a collective effort, requiring coordination of diverse actors, including: • Social media company staff, • Users who flag false, hateful or violent content, and • Organizations devoted to media accuracy and truth. Coordinate a Campaign for Social Media Literacy People do not want to be “data producing farm animals, domesticated and dependent” upon social media for our unhealthy addiction. (Vaidhyanathan 2018, 203) The public needs to understand how social media is impacting their personal lives and broader society. Providing social media literacy for billions of people is daunting. Governments, social media platforms, corporations, schools and universities, and civil society organizations all need to participate. The content of social media literacy should include the following: • basic training on privacy settings to help users be aware and control their information; • strategies for self-control, so social media users set limits on their own usage; • accountability coaching, so users understand the impact of incivility and hate speech; and • training to recognize the tricks of persuasion and propaganda. Propaganda does not work when people recognize the signs of propaganda. Yet even experts find it challenging to determine the difference between real and fake accounts F.