Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Research 7 Twitter] substantially increases their diffusion within (and less so between) ideological group boundaries.” A 2012 study by Berger and Milkman reviewed three months’ worth of New York Times articles and concluded that articles provoking “high-arousal” emotions — emotions that trigger a strong physiological response, such as anger and awe — are more likely to go viral. (These findings align with what many media creators have learned through experience; whether they are journalists, fashion influencers, food bloggers, or governmental propagandists, creators do not need academic research access to discover what serves their goals.) Many researchers believe there is an emerging “global underground disinformation and propaganda trade,” which includes government and terrorist agents as well as individuals and corporate vendors (such as the much-discussed Cambridge Analytica). Viral content tactics are just one more weapon in this underground community, and experts in those tactics are mercenaries. This space has not been publicly mapped or studied, although specific propaganda tactics have been. For example, a 2018 study by Starbird et al. describes how propagandists exploit another human tendency — that people are more likely to believe a piece of news they see or hear often — by creating false news accounts that seed the same narrative in multiple spaces, so it looks like the same “facts” are being reported by multiple different “people.” Some propagandists are now adept at identifying existing cultural fault lines within fastmoving, highly polarised discourse. More 2018 work from Starbird et al. shows how hashtags are sites of “framing contests” between interest groups: “Framing contests occur when two (or more) groups attempt to promote different frames — for example, in relation to a specific historical event or emerging social problem.” An event in the context of an emerging social problem (like, for example, a policeman shooting a Black teenager at the height of #BlackLivesMatter) might be an opportunity in the eyes of a propagandist, as different political frames jostle for control (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter versus #AllLivesMatter). Propagandists often find hashtags related to a contentious issue and then do things like (a) promote the narrative that supports their agenda, or (b) fan the flames of the conflict by supporting both sides in an inflammatory way. 7. What We Actually Know About Causation Correlation on Digital Media, Versus Another 2013 paper, “Secular vs. Islamist polarization in Egypt on Twitter” by Weber et al., found that increased hashtag polarity is an indicator of violent periods in the real world. This finding is obviously correlational (and correlation is not causation!), but it is part of a growing body of research that links online phenomena to offline phenomena. Proving causality (rather than mere correlation) is difficult when trying to understand the impact of digital platforms. In 2018, Muller and Schwartz took a stab at this with a paper titled “Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime.” They looked at antirefugee violence in Germany, and their findings suggest that, in places where hate speech is already spreading, Facebook enables violent mobs to mobilise more quickly than would