Cultural Violence and Peace Interventions in Social Media

Over the last decade, socio-technological innovations such as mobile technologies and social media services have strongly impacted modern culture and political processes. They are widely established in everyday life, but also relevant during natural and human-made crises and conflicts. For instance, Facebook was part of the 2010 so-called Arab Spring, in which the tool facilitated the communication and interaction between participants of political protests. Conversely, terrorists may recruit new members and disseminate ideologies. Based on the notions of cultural violence and cultural peace, this exploratory review firstly presents human cultural interventions in social media (e.g. dissemination of fake news, hate speech and terroristic propaganda) and respective countermeasures (e.g. algorithmic detection, counter-narratives, and reporting centres). Secondly, it discusses automatic cultural interventions realised via social bots (e.g. astroturfing, misdirection, and smoke screening) and countermeasures (e.g. crowdsourcing and visual analytics). Finally, this chapter proposes to differentiate a range of cultural interventions in terms of actors (human vs. machine) and intentions (conflict vs. peace) to identify future research potentials for supporting situational assessments during conflicts.