Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Research 9 Influencing voters is, of course, not limited to Facebook. A 2015 study by Epstein and Robertson found that manipulating search engine results can change voting behavior, too. The researchers also point out that the manipulations “can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.” (Epstein has been accused of having an axe to grind against Google, but his study passed our methodological review — and the results of his study are generally about search engines, not just Google.) Older research focused on television, conducted by Gentzkow in 2006, showed that increased access to television has decreased voter turnout in the U.S., which the author attributed to consumer choice: “Faced with both a reduction in a price of information and a much larger drop in the price of entertainment, consumers responded by substituting away from the former and toward the latter.” In other words, Gentzkow’s study suggests that when consumers have access to free highquality entertainment, they vote less. As we consider this study from the vantage of 2019, we must keep in mind that Internet provides a far greater quantity of free, high-quality entertainment than TV. 9. A Non-Western View Speaking of scale, the above studies largely centre on the West. If we take a global view, there is far less research about polarisation, government, and politics on social media — and there is an enormous need for it. In 2017, Foreign Policy ran an article by award-winning journalist Christina Larson that chronicled Facebook’s political impact in countries like Myanmar and Cambodia. One of the most disturbing parts is a story of how Facebook chose to run an experiment on its newsfeed in Cambodia during a touchy political period, which changed the news seen by millions of people: “Out of all the countries in the world, why Cambodia? This couldn’t have come at a worse time,” a Cambodian blogger told the BBC, explaining that the number of people who saw her public video had dropped by more than 80 percent. “Suddenly I realized, wow, they actually hold so much power.… [Facebook] can crush us just like that if they want to.” In early 2019, The Guardian published a piece by Julia Carrie Wong titled “'Overreacting to failure': Facebook's new Myanmar strategy baffles local activists.” Wong describes how Facebook has chosen to “ban four ethnic armed Myanmar-based groups from its site” — all of which oppose the Myanmar government that’s currently in place. Wong then notes, “These questions have resonance far beyond Myanmar. Had Facebook existed during the Rwandan genocide, one human rights observer asked, would it have allowed the government-backed Hutu genocidaires to use its platform while banning the rebel Tutsi forces that fought back?” It is hard to say how these decisions get made within large companies like Facebook. For example, Wong reports that Facebook commissioned a human rights report but then ignored the report’s findings in Myanmar — and without more visibility into Facebook’s process, it is hard to say why this happened. (Facebook’s PR department did not respond to