Last week I attended an event in Glasgow marking twenty five years of the Good Friday Agreement. There were vivid recollections from former Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt about his experiences as a journalist reporting on the talks at Castle Buildings from the car park outside. Professor Monica McWilliamsrecounted the sexism and misogyny experienced by members of the NI Women’s Coalition both during and after the negotiations. However, it was former SDLP leader and Deputy First Minister Mark Durkan’s reflections on how social media creates a cycle of ‘reacting to reactions’ that particularly resonated. He suggested that it would have been much harder to achieve the Good Friday Agreement in the context of the polarised political debates on social media today. 

Recent history suggests online platforms amplify extreme political positions that make it harder for political leaders in divided societies to build peace. While news media championed peace processes and offered a qualified humanisation of former combatants in countries such as Israel and Northern Ireland in the nineties, social media are communicative spaces that lay bare unresolved conflict-legacy issues. Most notably, online platforms were used to spread disinformation during the 2016 Columbian peace agreement referendum campaign; this was identified as a factor contributing to the narrow vote to reject the historic deal between the government and the FARC guerrillas. In the past few years there has been mounting evidence that information flows on online platforms inflame sectarian tensions in divided societies. Since 2015 there have been more than a hundred instances of lynching attributed to misinformation circulating on IM apps such as WhatsApp. In 2020, Facebook went as far as to publicly apologise for how its platform was used to incite violence against Muslim communities in Sri Lanka. My own research indicates that both disinformation and misinformation circulated on Twitter in real-time during contentious parades and protests in Northern Ireland. Many of these crude photoshopped images and unsubstantiated rumours came to prominence after being widely debunked by other social media users.

Yet it would be premature to suggest that online platforms have no potential to promote reconciliation in societies transitioning out of conflict. I found that the most significant peacebuilding contribution of social media was its empowerment of citizens to correct misinformation and disinformation that had the potential to generate sectarian violence. Such false information appeared to have a relatively short lifespan, due in no small part to the fact that tweeters had corrected them and professional journalists had chosen not to share these social media posts in their coverage of these events. Furthermore, it was apparent that much of the social media activity followed contentious parades and protests with little evidence it was directly influencing events on the ground. While it might be convenient to blame platforms like Facebook and Twitter for intercommunal violence, it was the context in which they were used that shaped the interactions between members of rival communities. During periods of political instability the publics mobilised on social media can both help and hinder efforts to moderate sectarian tensions in these contexts.

Would the peace process of the mid-nineties have been possible in the social media era? Certainly it would appear more difficult to keep negotiations private. Journalists like Nesbitt are no longer left outside in the car park looking in. Those within Castle Buildings would also have been subject to much online hate speech, misinformation and trolling by those who opposed the peace process. Yet, it does a disservice to those who negotiated the Agreement to believe that it would have been derailed by such online chatter and noise. While acknowledging the imperfect nature of the Agreement, Monica McWilliams suggested that the leaders of the main parties had the courage not only to compromise but also to explain why they had done so to their respective communities. Fast forward to 2023 and relations between the two largest parties, the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein, remain fractious. Both have collapsed the powersharing institutions at various points in the past decade; most recently, the DUP have refused to take their seats in the Executive unless the Northern Ireland Protocol and the so-called ‘Irish Sea Border’ created by the UK’s EU Withdrawal Agreement are removed. The politicisation of issues such as a proposed Irish language act has reverberated online as supporters of these parties engage in whataboutery and accuse each other of bad faith. Perhaps the current generation of political leaders need to heed the words of Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume: 

“Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it”.