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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ConflictNET (The Politics and Practice of Social Media in Conflict)

Teaser

Summary

There are unprecedented efforts to extend the reach of the Internet to the worldâ€™s most remote regions. These efforts largely build on a conception of the Internet and social media as â€˜liberation technologiesâ€™ that can help people realize human rights, improve access to services or reduce corruption.. However, there has been far less discussion about the impact of extending Internet access to conflict-affected regions where the state is weak or has limited reach.

The ConflictNET team will have the unique opportunity to follow, in real-time, ambitious efforts to extend the Internet to some of the worldâ€™s most challenging areas and ask difficult questions that are often overlooked. The central research question therefore asks: How does increased access to social media affect the balance between peace-building efforts and attempts to perpetuate violence in conflict-affected communities?

The project is structured around four main research themes. Two of the research streams focus on the online, investigating how a technical, ideational and legal framework is being created to encourage certain uses while discouraging others, and analysing actual messages disseminated online. Another two research streams will focus on offline implications of social media, grounding their use in the everyday politics and practices in conflict-affected societies.

1. Tactics and Strategies to Shape the Information Environment: Maps the tactics and strategies of different actors (e.g. companies, governments, international organizations, terrorist groups) in conflict settings as they use and respond to the increasing importance of social media, and how they may attempt to extend or restrict their use. This WP focuses on efforts to shape the information environment in ways that can favour specific uses of the Internet and social media, while discouraging others.

2. Conflict and Peace Online: Analyses the online dimensions of conflict, its calls for offline actions (such as calls for violence, encouraging peace or promoting political agendas) and how social media are changing (either empowering or disempowering) who has a voice in conflict. It focuses on developing innovative methods for looking at hate speech online.

3. Local Governance: Power and Resilience: Identifies patterns and changes in how different actors are innovating to use social media to extend power and influence and affect violence, governance, security and justice in areas of conflict.

4. Migration: Opportunities for Exit and Entry: Works towards understanding whether and how social media are changing the networks and opportunities for exit from, and entry to, conflict-affected communities. This includes refugees fleeing violence as well as individuals returning to participate in conflicts or contribute to peace.

This project addresses many critical issues that societies around the world are grappling with, including how to address online hate speech that might lead to violence and how social media is changing the ways people migrate, particularly from the Horn of Africa to other countries in Africa and Europe. It also focuses on very contemporary issues such as the growing trend of internet shutdowns. In many respects the future of the internet is being fought and debated at the peripheries- in Africa- and this project engages with some of the most critical issues that are arising there with implications for all citizens across Europe.

Work performed

The ConflictNET project is proceeding well. Many parts of the project are ahead of schedule. For example, we have moved forward research for WP5 that focuses on social media and migration. This is because of the urgency and timeliness of the research as well as challenges -the ethics approval was very time consuming and it also takes extensive time in the field to establish connections with vulnerable refugee populations. Interviews were initially expected to take place in year 3 but we have started them in year 2. We have also been conducting interviews for WP2 that were scheduled for Year 3 and the first part of Year 4 as we realized that they are essential for understanding what is happening online. As a consequence we have slightly pushed back the coding an analysis in WP3.
We have a number of publications forthcoming and at present data is being analysed and additional publications drafted. Publications forthcoming include:
- Transforming Media and Conflict Research, forthcoming in â€œTheorising Media Conflictâ€ to be published in late 2019 by Berghahn (D1)
- Online Hate Speech, forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Method to be published in late 2019 by Routledge (D6)
- We are co-editing special issue on Internet Shutdowns in Africa has been accepted by the International Journal for Communication. It includes two articles by ConflictNet team members and several articles by colleagues at the Internet Shutdowns conference we organized. (D3 and D4)
- An article on censorship and violent conflict has been prepared (D3 and D4)
We have held a project workshop in Africa on Internet Shutdowns (related to WP2) and the second project workshop is planned for October 2019 on Datafied Refugees (related to WP5). These are large international workshops that engage academics from both the EU and Africa, and policymakers as well as representatives from social media companies.
We have also collected extensive material related to the Social Media and Conflict Observatory including laws and multimedia material. We are working with a webdesigner on the best way to present this material.
Given rapid changes within social media and the tools available for mapping and identifying hate speech online, we moved forward our WP on refugees and pushed back the WP on online hate speech. We are slightly revising the methodology (no impact on the budget) and will be adopting a more technical approach.

The PI has assembled a large transnational team involving researchers in Africa and Europe, with a range of disciplinary backgrounds (from legal scholars to anthropologists) and is regularly approached by visiting students and scholars that wish to be affiliated with the project in Oxford.

Final results

This research is challenging given how fast moving the field is and how contemporary (and often sensitive) the issues are.

Some examples as to how this project is moving beyond the state of the art include:
- The research on migration and social media is overturning many assumptions about how social media facilitates (or not) migratory pathways and we are able to identify strong differences in Somali migration and the role of social media to Italy, Kenya and South Africa (all major destinations) and the particular importance of social media and the politics of refugee return to Somalia. For the first time, we are trying to bring together the voices of East African migrants (unmediated by international media)
- We are identifying new methods to research online hate speech that move beyond the more manual ways (human coders) and the growing emphasis on automation to look at bottom up understandings of hate speech and human flagging. This is a novel approach with the unique potential to better understand local and highly contextual definitions of hate speech and understanding the gap between why people flag hateful content comparatively frequently in Europe with Africa (where users of social media rarely flag hate speech yet are highly exposed to it).
-We are adopting critical and new perspectives to internet censorship particularly in situations of mass violence. We have used internet shutdowns as an entry point into broader discussions about the responsibility of social media companies, governments, and civil society to address online hate speech, and we are drawing on historical precedents for censoring mass media (eg radio and television) in situations of extreme conflict.

The project is based on a bottom up spirit and focuses on engaging communities, researchers and those affected by conflict in Africa as much as possible. We have been collecting the voices of migrants (through interviews, songs, poems, videos, etc) that will contribute to an online social media and conflict observatory. We have also established networks with policymakers and advocates to increase the impact of the research with, for example, international organizations such as the International Red Cross, the Cultural Video Foundation, and the Media Institute of Southern Africa. This network will become increasingly important as the publications are released to ensure impact beyond the academic community. We are also deeply committed to fair sharing principles and ensuring that the research contributes to the communities being researched through co-authoring publications with local researchers and organizing research events on the continent.