How social media insights shape real world peace
A new open-source platform has been customized for mediators and peacebuilders, writes Build Up
Adapted from original blog posted by Build Up.
What happens online rarely stays online. As a mediator, understanding this interplay between the online and offline conflict dynamics is essential. Phoenix, a tailored social media listening platform for peacebuilders and mediators, bridges this critical gap.
The way digital content is consumed and interacted with fuels polarization, directly harming individuals through harassment and dehumanization, while indirectly eroding trust in institutions and increasing the risk of violence.
While experimental research highlights correlations and cases of harm, pinpointing causal evidence and crafting solutions remain formidable challenges. This interplay between online and offline conflict dynamics paralyzes conflict responders and community peacebuilders, who, while best equipped to understand the contextual conflict dynamics rarely have the resources to focus on it. Without understanding this interplay, interventions risk worsening online or offline tensions.
Understanding what digital harms stem from what happens on social media, and how they affect conflict, both online and offline, is critical for designing evidence-based dialogue and mediation initiatives today.
We at Build Up recently launched Phoenix as an open source, free platform designed to enable peacebuilders and mediators to conduct ethical and participatory social media listening in order to inform conflict transformation work. Watch this 11 minute video to see a brief walk-through of the platform.
Phoenix provides a fine-grained understanding of what divides are playing out on digital media, how they are spreading, who is involved and their real-world impacts. In the wake of CrowdTangle's closure—a tool widely used for analyzing social media content—Phoenix provides an essential alternative.
What is Phoenix?
The Phoenix platform is user-friendly, and allows peacebuilders and mediators with no technical knowledge of social media listening to:
Gather posts and comments from social media platforms, based on search parameters they define;
Classify social media accounts as well as the text of the posts and comments, including with simple AI-assisted tools;
Explore the data they have collected from social media platforms, by searching it and building an interactive dashboard with graphs, tables and filters.
More about these three steps is in the Phoenix manual.
How does social media listening help?
Social media listening can be used to answer many different kinds of questions relevant to peacebuilders and mediators. These three uses of social media listening come up consistently:
To quickly analyze one piece of misinformation—what it is, where it originates, and who it affects. Particularly important during sensitive moments such as elections or peace processes.
To monitor how narratives about a conflict evolve over time. This reveals what is being said about a topic or topics (e.g. a group of people, event or political issue). We can also understand what a group of people (e.g. youth groups or journalists) share on social media, and how connects to the topic.
To investigate harmful behaviors online, such as hate speech or harassment. This can be useful to inform digital peacebuilding programs or developing a social media code of conduct as part of a mediation process.
Start with a good problem statement
At Build Up, we have learned the importance of generating “problem statements” early in the process, which synthesise the rationale for our analysis, such as:
Conduct a mapping of online hate speech occurring at the local level in Coastal and Northern Kenya, understand who is using the language and to what end.
Understand how Yemenis are expressing ethnic and religious identities on social media.
Explore what narratives and behaviours are used to intimidate immigrants and people of colour on Instagram in the Netherlands.
Using Phoenix, and keeping it free
Peacebuilders and mediators can request access to the platform hosted for free by Build Up by filling out this application form.
Developers can access the code in GitLab, and deploy it. Phoenix code is licensed under AGLP-3.0.
Phoenix was developed by Build Up and datavaluepeople, with the support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. Phoenix is a digital public good: the code is open source and we aim to host a free platform for approved users.
Since 2020, Phoenix has been deployed in over 20 countries to support mediation teams, INGOs, UN agencies, and over 20 civil society organizations — in Arabic, Kurdish, Swahili, French and English. In 2023, Phoenix was selected as a featured solution by The Digital Public Goods Alliance and the United Nations Development Programme and showcased in the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit.
If you are interested in helping us maintain the code and keep the platform free, we invite you to donate on this page, or contact us at phoenix@howtobuildup.org.
Build Up is a digital-first peacebuilding organization that combines innovative and traditional tools to transform conflict, leveraging technology to foster connection, collaboration, and inclusion while addressing the complex interplay between technology and societal divisions.