Peace on Facebook

ICT for Peacebuilding 1 Minute

Peace on Facebook

The Persuasive Technology Lab of Stanford University seems to have teamed up with Facebook to create a dedicated page on Facebook celebrating initiatives and conversations using and on Facebook in support of peace.

http://peace.facebook.com is in and of itself not a tool for peacebuilding, and does not for example point to the platform’s use in Egypt to stand up against a repressive, dictatorial government, as reported by the New York Times in January.

The page does link to how Facebook was used to organise against FARC, against crime in London, and its integration in a documentary on children in Uganda. I have also written earlier about pathbreaking uses of  Facebook’s in Sri Lanka to strengthen dissent and critical discussions.

Do you know of any other meaningful examples that use Facebook as a central tool for peacebuilding or in a peace process?

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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