Online ‘bots’ are often seen as negative, and dangerous, but they can also be used for good, as one social enterprise group is proving.

Peacebuilders have raised concerns over current social divisions in online media.

“Increasingly, people use their media in a bubble, and it’s possible for you to hear news only that you agree with,” said Melanie Greenberg, CEO of Alliance for Peacebuilding. “And if you’re looking at your social media, you’re broadcast media, internet media, you never have to run up against any facts that run counter to your own political beliefs.”

“What polarization is,” said Jacob Lefton, from Build Up, “as a phenomenon, is that groups of people are separating from each other and building stereotypes of the other groups of people, and losing shared facts and losing shared language to talk about the issues, and it doesn’t matter if one side is right or wrong in this if their can’t be a healthy civic conversation.”

“And for us it’s one of the indicators for a society that’s sliding toward conflict,” Mr Lefton said. “And we’re seeing more extreme hate speech, we’re seeing hate crimes, and these stronger and stronger divisions.”

Now Build Up are using social media bots to help depolarize conversations. Their The Commons project targets people who connect others and looks for common ground.

“So first a bot contacts them, and says, you know “Hi, it’s interesting that you’re talking about this, what do you think?’,” said Mr Lefton. “And we ask just sort of an open question about the broader topic of polarization, trying to invite a response, and then if they respond we follow up with a facilitator who then takes it and attempts to have a longer conversation with them to find out what their core values are and their issues and invite them to further action in depolarizing the way that these conversations are happening.”

“It’s really hard to bring people together, and so that’s why we think it’s necessary in this way, is basically saying ‘Can we do the same types of active interventions in these platforms as people who are using it as adversarial technique, but can we do it as a connecting technique?'”

The project is explicitly non-partisan and has reached out to 12,400 people online. Build Up will present its full findings at MIT in March and hopes they have built a little peace online.

“We can’t expect that everyone will become an actor,” said Mr Lefton, “But we can believe that if we raise people’s awareness of it, and engage them in healthy conversations about it then maybe in future conversations they will have more tools to engage with them in a healthy way.”

What do recent protests in Iran and the uprisings of the Arab Spring have in common? They were both sparked by economic tension. In Iran, rapid price increases on some food items recently set off protests, while the 2011 Arab Spring protests began with a Tunisian street vendor setting himself on fire to protest economic hardship.

“It does eventually have a political impact,” said Professor Amr Adly, from the American University of Cairo. “If enough people can’t tap into sources of income creation and wealth, and distribution, then you end up eventually with economic backwardness, and lower standards of living that can translate into what happened in 2011, and into political action.”

Conflict reporting from the Middle East often focuses on ethnic, religious, or political divides but rarely investigates links between economy and conflict. If economics is often a critical driver of war in the region, why is the issue such a media taboo?

1. It’s culturally sensitive

“I think I the last ten years we’ve found that it’s easier to talk about politics than it is about business,” said Nicholas Noe, Co-founder of MideastWire. “It’s much easier to talk about long-standing political arguments, debates, new formations etc. than it is to talk about the perhaps more sensitive issue of money, of cash, of influence, of how politics and economics are connected – this is a very sensitive subject.”

2. It’s politically sensitive

“It feels much harder to talk about these subjects than it does for example talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict, or religious issues – Sunni/Shia – whatever it may be,” said Mr Noe.

“This is something that is tough for everyone to talk about, not least the big powerful Western actors, who – when you turn over the rock – it turns out that there’s not just local corrupt practices but they are often times, let’s say, facilitated by or even depended on international financial mechanisms, specifically Western banks and governments.”

3. It’s dangerous

Globally, 262 media workers were imprisoned in 2017, with Turkey and Egypt two of the top jailers.

“I think you can view this as an indictment of the countries that are the leading jailers of journalists,” said Joel Simon, from the Committee to Protect Journalists. “But, you can also view it as an indictment of the entire international system, that is supposed to isolate systematic violators of this critical global norm, and ensure that there’s a consequence.”

“There are people in the region that are doing great work on this – and very courageously so,” said Mr Noe. “We cannot over estimate benefits of free media in general, that is what is required for a healthy public debate – or a public debate to start with,” said Professor Adly. “Many economic issues are too great to be dealt with by economists, as have repercussions, and inherently political issues, so need a public debate, and that requires a free media.”