Social Media 4 Peace Project

The specific objectives and activities of the project are as follows:

• Enhancing understanding of the root causes, scale, and impact of potentially harmful content and of the effectiveness of the tools to address it in 3 pilot countries by:
  • Mapping legal instruments and tools developed by national authorities and social media platforms to address the issue (see reports below).
  • Monitoring the context of dissemination of harmful content - its root causes, intent, and effects on people and their behaviour (see reports below).
  • Establishing a national multi-stakeholder platform to define gaps between the realities of the phenomenon and measures taken by various stakeholders to tackle harmful online content (i.e., sufficiently efficient or over-restrictive, compliant with international human rights standards).
  • Drafting a preliminary country-based risk assessment based on societal and political cleavages and drafting recommendations to increase the effectiveness of measures and tools to address potentially harmful content and prevent conflicts and instability.
• Curbing potentially harmful content online in 3 pilot countries by:
  • Developing new tools, including digital ones to address harmful content.
  • Increasing the capacities of stakeholders (authorities, judicial operators, social media companies, and civil society organisations (CSOs) in relation to harmful content) to improve content moderation practices.
  • Piloting "appeals councils" to adjudicate on social media users' complaints.
  • Informing the global community of the lessons learnt from the project.
• Enhancing promotion and support of peace-building narratives and initiatives through digital technologies and social media by organising:
  • Training of selected CSOs working on peace processes on the use of social media to produce and share peace-building narratives.
  • Media and information literacy (MIL) training to empower youth to be more resilient to harmful content - notably, disinformation and hate speech online.
  • Online awareness-raising campaigns and development of apps and hackathons to support peace initiatives.
  • Training of selected media professionals on conflict-sensitive reporting.

In 2021 and 2022, the following country-specific activities took place related to Objective 3:

• BiH:
  • 42 peace-building CSOs were trained on community guidelines related to online harmful content.
  • 60 media professionals were trained.
  • 3 youth champions were trained to share online peace-building narratives and to engage youth.
• Indonesia:
  • 28 representatives of CSOs were trained, and 8 virtual MIL workshops with 132 young participants were held.
  • 97 young participants took part in 2 social media competitions.
• Kenya:
  • 1,240+ young people were equipped with MIL skills, and 44 CSOs were empowered to use digital tools for peace-building ahead of elections.
  • 200+ media professionals from 40 different media institutions were trained ahead of the 2022 elections.
  50 girls were equipped with coding skills, and 3 mobile apps were developed in Swahili, Sheng, and English through the MobiPeace Hackathon.

Related to Objective 1, the following research reports were published in 2022, which map the legal frameworks and responses by actors in each country to address harmful content (Columbia report still pending):

• Regulating Harmful Content Online in Bosnia and Herzegovina [PDF]
• Regulating Harmful Content in Indonesia: Legal Frameworks, Trends, and Concerns [PDF]
• Mapping of Legal Framework and Responses by Actors to Address Harmful Content Online in Kenya [PDF]

The following reports on online content moderation were also published by UNESCO and ARTICLE 19 in June 2022. The reports provide concrete recommendations and calls for creating local coalitions on freedom of expression and content moderation to bridge the gap between internet companies and CSOs:

• Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression: Bridging the Gap between Social Media and Local Civil Society - Global Summary Report [PDF]
• Content Moderation and Local Stakeholders in Bosnia and Herzegovina [PDF]
• Content Moderation and Local Stakeholders in Indonesia [PDF]
• Content Moderation and Local Stakeholders in Kenya [PDF]

In late 2022, UNESCO, in close cooperation with ARTICLE 19 and relevant national stakeholders, started the process of creating a national multi-stakeholder coalition on freedom of expression and content moderation in Kenya. The coalition is intended to help facilitate a sustainable, inclusive, credible, and meaningful dialogue between local civil society groups and social media platforms to address online hate narratives and disinformation in Kenya.

In February 2023, over 50 main partners from the four countries involved in the forming of the national coalitions as part of this project took part in the UNESCO Internet for Trust global conference "Towards Guidelines for Regulating Digital Platforms for Information as a Public Good". One element of this experience involved highlighting the work UNESCO is doing to set up national coalitions on content moderation and freedom of expression to bridge the gap locally between social media platforms and CSOs. Participants: explored the challenges of interpreting global policies locally and having dialogues between regulators, tech companies, and CSOs at national level; underlined key findings of their research conducted as part of the project; shared their expectations for the national coalitions; and examined challenges with and solutions for regulating platforms. Click here to watch a video recording of the side event featuring the Social Media 4 Peace project at the Internet for Trust conference.

Conflict, Freedom of Expression, Media Development, Democracy

Rationale for the project:
"Apart from spreading hate, social media are also increasingly used to spread disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda designed to mislead a population, as strongly noticed during the COVID-19 sanitary crisis. The moderation and curation rules of online, potentially harmful content are mostly discussed at the global level in a 'one size fits all' fashion. Yet, the complexity of addressing online, potentially harmful content lies in the impossibility to define precisely the boundaries of the type of content covered irrespective of the context. This is why the project foresees to, in addition to using human rights principles as a universal baseline, take into account social, cultural, and linguistic nuances to develop and review content moderation and curation rules and tools in a localized manner.

Moreover, digital technologies, in particular social media, are not systematically used in peace-building processes, although there are few recent examples of organisations and campaigns that have successfully mobilized social media to empower people, notably the youth, to allow an inclusive dialogue on issues such as climate change. This is why the project will maximize digital technologies' potential to promote initiatives and narratives that create incentives for peace rather than violence to become a critical element of peace-building."