Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited by the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) to give a presentation on the impact of social media around political dynamics in mission contexts to a meeting of Deputy Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (DSRSGs) held in Berlin, 11-12 February 2019.
The agnda of the two-day meeting was anchored to a number of enduring, pressing or prescient challenges around peacekeeping and peacebuilding. These included the role of women and gender, early warning, intervention, the role and relevance of DSRSGs and mandates.
Sanjana’s presentation, embedded below, can be downloaded as a PDF or PPT here.
Based on Sanjana’s doctoral research, the presentation was anchored to top-level dynamics of social media especially in contexts featuring a democratic deficit, systemic violence, protracted conflict or chronic instability.
The overarching dynamics of social media in polity and society were framed through a seascape, where two key social media platforms were highlighted as examples of how, in the short-term and over a longer duration of time, content produced, promoted and engaged with digitally, impacted real-world relations and perceptions. The time taken from the genesis, seed or initial thrust of an idea, perspective or frame over social media, to kinetic or physical reaction or response, often leading to lasting impact, Sanjana noted, was increasingly compressed. The centripetal and centrifugal responses to content over social media, either binding communities to shared narratives or seeding distrust in alternative perspectives, happens constantly and is a defining feature of all the platforms. Sanjana noted that this gives rise to complex media ecologies, like bubbles, where definitions, binaries and more conventional frames, break down. Understanding this complexity for what it is, Sanjana averred, is the first step to engaging with it in a productive manner.
Sanjana provided three key frames to understand social media ecologies as they exist today. One, that contextual grounding is important and that the manner in which social media platforms are used in different countries and regions needs to be accounted for. Flagging a challenge around the study of social media, Sanjana flagged academic research on how replication of social media dynamics is often impossible and that if measures aren’t taken to carefully collect and curate, that knowledge on these platforms is often quickly and irrevocably lost.
Sanjana also flagged that social media is extremely resilient to censorship and control, and that any attempt to over-simplify how complex a phenomenon it was, risked grossly misreading a context. With regards to how local communities in mission contexts engaged with social media over the long-term, Sanjana noted how a demographic whose primary engagement with the world is through social media, would change their perceptions of UN, mission, mandate and other actors depending on what they consumed, or were made to believe over content they engaged with.
Looking at four key challenges to the UN and integrated missions, Sanjana highlighted black swan events, the dangers arising from unintended consequences, innovations that by-passed protocols and SWOT assessments, misinformation and algorithmic bias, the pitfalls of working with Silicon Valley companies and artificial intelligence going awry.
Looking at four key opportunities, Sanjana noted the ability to and importance of engaging the last mile (i.e. local communities, directly) over social media, how a better understanding of complexity could help stronger strategic interventions, how social media was already inextricably entwined in the governance frameworks of many countries and contexts, and finally, how it could be used to reach out to a new, younger demographic in support of mission, mandate and UN writ large.
Acknowledging the many steps made by the UN in just the past year, including the setting up of the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation and recalling the Foundation’s input to the HLP, Sanjana ended his remarks by noting how the UN could play an important role in shaping how missions embraced or engaged with social media by serving as a platform for critical conversations, reflections and innovation.
The discussion which lasted for nearly 45 minutes after the presentation was anchored to social media dynamics (the factual vs. the emotive), the way in which the UN worked, misinformation, the challenges around getting the the right people into the UN to embrace new challenges (who didn’t fit existing profiles), the role and relevance of big data, political will, and the need to look at ways through with social media governance could play a role in capturing its potential – for the UN and beyond.
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The ICT4Peace Foundation’s close cooperation with and staunch support of ZIF goes back many years. Sanjana was invited to give a key presentation at ZIF’s 15th-year celebrations in 2017. A year before, Sanjana was invited to deliver a presentation Operationalizing Peace Operations Reform: New Media and New Technologies. The Foundation was also present for its 10th-year celebrations, where the MoU on cutting-edge training of peacekeeping missions, which was subsequently offered as an ENTRi certified course, was recalled.