Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor at the ICT4Peace Foundation, was invited by Dr. Kerstin Tomiak to deliver a lecture on social media and democracy at CODE University of Applied Sciences on 15 November 2021.
Sanjana’s presentation followed the contours of his policy brief for and presentation at He Whenua Taurikura, New Zealand’s first annual conference on countering terrorism and violent extremism, held in June 2021. Taking an ecological perspective to dis/misinformation and other platform harms, Sanjana flagged the importance of grounded study, and context-specific investigations in attempts to ascertain role of social media in helping or harming democracy. Speaking to how social media simultaneously features prosocial and antisocial content, Sanjana also drew from his doctoral research, and drew a complicated landscape around how social media is used.
The Q&A session covered a lot of ground, including the Global South’s exposure to platform harms and violent offline consequences, the future of Facebook/Meta and implications of the metaverse on peace and conflict, potential and pitfalls of decentralised social media platforms, governance and regulatory measures against mis/disinfo that are fit for purpose, and the complicated role of social media in governance.
Download the slides of Sanjana’s lecture as a PDF here.