Talk to any peacebuilder trying to disseminate an alternative, complex narrative about a conflict, and they’ll tell you a version of the same thing: the odds are stacked against peace on social media platforms. It’s always been an uphill battle, but these days it feels like there’s no countering the digitally amplified hate and division.
You don’t even have to be a peacebuilder: this message probably resonates intuitively. We all know online toxicity is a problem. So what would it take to unstack these odds? Over the past months, I’ve been doing some thinking about this question as part of Ashoka’s Next Now initiative. The result is this paper, which in essence argues that online polarization should be seen as a negative externality of surveillance capitalism, just like carbon is a negative externality of industrial capitalism — and as such, it should be taxed.
