Social media has become a source of news for billions around the world. This is especially true for younger people and in countries with limited traditional news sources. This transition in the creation and distribution of news is transforming journalism, and creating opportunities for news about peace to go viral. Opportunities for peace journalism to go viral due to this changing information environment was discussed as part of a webinar series hosted by the Media and Peacebuilding Project (MPP) at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA), along with partners. The event, held on April 3rd, featured three experts discussing innovations in journalism relating to social media, and how peace journalism can adapt to a digital world.
The first to speak was Shahira Fahmy, a professor at the American University of Cairo who has written over one hundred articles and four books. She spoke about how most studies that have examined war and peace journalism have focused mainly on analyzing text, and ignores the role of images and visual framing: the process of selecting and highlighting “specific elements of perceived reality in a visual frame.” As she described it, images can be used as a way of “reconstructing reality”, framing the perception of specific issues and influencing news audiences. There is little academic research of the impact of visual framing on war and peace journalism, and Frahmi shared some of the work she has done to address this gap. She spoke about some of the factors that can influence the results of visual framing.
The role of the subject, whether “victim, aggressor, negotiator, or demonstrator”, depends on the images selected – two images of the same subject may portray completely different roles depending on the framing. Other aspects include the age of the subjects, whether positive or negative emotions are brought on by the image selection, and whether the visual framing promotes escalation or deescalation.
Overall, Fahmy correlated the visual framing of peace with images of achievement and progress, a war framing may evoke feelings of backlash and deterioration, while a neutral framing would portray the status quo. Visual studies tend to show that visual narratives adopt a predominantly war-oriented approach, which appears to confirm the findings of textual studies of journalism. Previous articles on this series of webinars have featured plenty of evidence that peace journalism is appealing to audiences when they are exposed to it, but the results of these studies illustrate how difficult that can be, and the scarcity of peace narratives in mainstream journalism. Social media, which is, in Fahmy’s words, “reshaping news” has emerged as the dominant force, and can offer an alternative path for increasing the visibility of peace journalism and peace narratives. Unsurprisingly, given the relative youth of social media – which is still in its infancy compared to traditional media, there are very few complete studies on this subject, althougH Fahmy intends to carry out a study of TikTok to look at a number of aspects, including association, editability, and engagement variables. Given TikTok’s popularity, role in spreading dangerous misinformation, and ongoing suspicions over its parent company’s connection with China’s ruling party and its strict censorship regime, this is the type of study that could be extremely valuable in shaping the future of peace journalism.
Ahmed Al-Rawi, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, continued the discussion of the link between visual images and emotion in journalism, as well as the emerging practice of studying social media. He spoke about the importance of emotions, and a recent study looking at some prominent newspapers: the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, to see what drives audiences to engage with them. He has also carried out a study of what he called “networked emotional news”, which looked at how people use emojis and other reactions when responding to Facebook stories. What he found was very much in line with previous presenters – which found that audiences tend to prefer positive news.
Another study looked at Telegram, a widely used social network in much of the world – which has become a source of information for many on conflicts and peacebuilding, including the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. This study was focused on which stories audiences were interested in, and whether interest was driven by positive or negative stories. Al-Rawi’s studies of the top stories on Telegram, found that many featured inspiring, positive stories which prompted peace – people rescuing others from rubble, and stories of people praying and protesting for peace around the world. While a lot of viral content is divisive and may spread messages of hate and violence, this study shows that there is a significant audience for positive content that promotes peace. Overall. Al-Rawi found that emotions make this a very complicated and conceptual issue.
The final speaker was Dr. Matteo Cinelli, an assistant professor of computer science at the Sapienza University of Rome, and an expert in information diffusion and social media. His presentation, called “Postcards from Social Media” covered his studies into misinformation, online toxicity and segregation, and what he called the “infodemic” – an overload of information. Cinelli spoke about how the Covid-19 pandemic led to an infodemic on social media, with an overabundance of information on the subject, and that his center worked with the WHO to study and define the term – a crucial task considering the extreme prevalence of misinformation surrounding the disease, and the vaccines and public health measures which combatted it. He agreed that social media represents a consequential paradigm shift in media. Old media followed the “ritual of objectivity”, with publication patterns driven by the most followed sources. New media, however, is far less organized and rigid, with interconnected actors from various locations, organizations, and professional identities driving stories. Social media has led to a change in both who produces stories, and who consumes them, which presents both opportunities and challenges.
Technology has radically transformed the way news and information are accessed and consumed, but Cinelli also emphasized that the human aspect still plays a major role. Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out information that confirms already held beliefs, while avoiding dissonant information, has an enormously consequential impact. When combined with algorithmic recommendations, which reinforce confirmation biases by showing social media audiences the type of posts they have reacted well to in the past, it is easy to create online echo chambers. This creates numerous issues, as it becomes easy to only consume information that reinforces previous beliefs and biases, which becomes a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation.
Any number of consequential topics, including the efficacy and safety of Covid-19 vaccines, false claims of fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Brexit, and Russia’s two invasions of Ukraine since the 2014 revolution, have seen millions of online media consumers bombarded with false narratives that effectively construct alternate realities. This can have important ramifications for peace journalism as well – echo chambers can exclude peace narratives, promote manipulated ones, and emphasize calls for war and violence. As Cinelli said in his conclusion, the study of society and social media is the study of a “moving target”, and understanding it is crucial in the digital age.
This series of webinars has come to an end, although recordings of all six sessions can be found here. As one of the largest organizations dedicated to peace journalism, Peace News will continue to report on events such as these, which bring the practice to the forefront of academic discussions of journalism.
