2 Policy Brief No. 44 Toda Peace Institute Introduction In a world that is becoming more and more polarised, there are both problems and opportunities for peacebuilding and governance on digital media. Lately, the problems are at centre stage. This is great, because many digital media issues (such as the unprecedented capacity to cheaply spread viral political propaganda at a global scale) have been ignored for too long. Yet some reactions and claims about digital media issues are overblown, and the overcorrections will create new problems. For instance, broad societal polarisation often gets laid at the internet’s door, but that is a dicey claim. It is true that polarisation is increasing in major democracies, but it is not clear that digital media is driving the increase; polarisation began its upward trend decades before the invention of the Internet. And overcorrecting to “fix” polarisation in the media, without addressing its root causes, could mean that major social issues get ignored or unfairly quelled. Still, even if polarisation is not driven by digital media, severe conflicts are playing out on the digital stage. For example, political lies that are weaponised to go viral within minutes are still a gigantic, urgent problem, even if those lies do not increase polarisation. It is also plausible that some forms of digital media drive polarisation and others do not. Different social platforms probably have different societal impacts — for instance, Facebook probably has different impacts from Twitter, which are different from Reddit, which are different from Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Livejournal, WeChat, Weibo, Line, Tiktok, Yelp, Ello, Mastodon, Gab, etc. — and it is hard to analogise any social media impacts to those of less social platforms, like Google or Amazon. (Fun fact: the vast majority of digital media studies are done with Twitter data, because Twitter has the most publicly-accessible data compared to other major platforms.) Plus, digital media impacts probably vary by culture, and there is not yet much research on any of this. We need a finer-grained sense of how society is affected by digital media because that is the only way to start resolving the conflicts we face. And it is not just polarisation that has been exaggerated. One 2018 Buzzfeed News article about the “Yellow Jackets” riots in France ran with the headline, “The ‘Yellow Vest’ Riots In France Are What Happens When Facebook Gets Involved With Local News” — i.e., blaming Facebook for a massive social movement. This is sloppy from a data-crunching perspective; it also could be dangerous. The “Yellow Vests” have generated a million-signature petition, and they participated in riots in which people died. That is a significant movement, and global society should seek a precise and accurate understanding of the forces driving the Yellow Vests, because there is probably more than just Facebook. Most importantly, in terms of documenting productive approaches: No matter “who is to blame,” new opportunities to build peace are blossoming on digital media. Many people are working hard to build peace using the Internet, and we can learn a lot from their approaches, even if they do not work at a big internet company.