Constructive Social Media and Mass Communication

6. Civic Knowledge and Skills

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Both traditional mass media and social media can make intractable conflicts worse. They can reward sensationalism, spread rumors, promote fear, and make opponents seem more extreme or dangerous than they really are. But media are not doomed to play this destructive role. Radio, television, newspapers, podcasts, online forums, and social platforms can also help people understand complex conflicts, hear from those who are usually ignored, correct falsehoods, and see constructive options that would otherwise remain invisible. The challenge is to design media systems that do more than attract attention. They also need to help citizens think, listen, and act more constructively.

Traditional journalism can contribute to this goal by changing what counts as a good story. Much conflict coverage focuses on accusation, scandal, violence, and political horse races. Those stories are sometimes necessary, but they are not enough. Solutions journalism tries to cover not only what is going wrong, but also how people are trying to solve problems and what can be learned from their successes, failures, and limits. Constructive journalism makes a similar argument: journalism should still investigate wrongdoing and hold powerful actors accountable, but it should avoid making the public feel that every problem is hopeless and every opponent is evil. In divided societies, this broader view of the news can reduce cynicism and help people imagine practical ways forward.

Media can also create better conversations across dividing lines. Dialogue journalism, developed by Spaceship Media and others, uses reporting to support extended, moderated, fact-based conversations among people who disagree. Instead of simply quoting the loudest voices on each side, journalists can convene citizens, ask what they most want others to understand, provide reliable information in response to participants' questions, and then report on what the conversation reveals. This approach does not require journalists to become advocates for any particular solution. It asks them to become stewards of a more useful public conversation. That is very different from the familiar media pattern in which conflict is staged as a fight and the audience is invited to choose a team.

Peacebuilding media have also played important roles in violent and post-violent conflicts. BI's case study of Mega FM in northern Uganda describes a radio station that used interviews, public discussion, drama, testimony, and practical information to support communities affected by the Lord's Resistance Army conflict. The point was not simply to broadcast comforting messages. It was to provide credible information, make room for public deliberation, help people deal with local disputes, and support the difficult transition from war toward resettlement and reconstruction. Similar approaches have been used by organizations such as Search for Common Ground, which has long used radio, television, drama, and participatory media to humanize opponents and model more constructive ways of handling conflict.

Social media can serve constructive purposes too, but doing so requires changing the incentives built into online platforms. At their worst, platforms amplify whatever provokes the strongest reaction. At their best, they can help people find reliable information, encounter cross-cutting perspectives, organize local problem-solving, and respond quickly to dangerous rumors. UNESCO's Social Media 4 Peace initiative, for example, works to strengthen resilience to disinformation and hate speech, while also protecting freedom of expression. Build Up helps peacebuilders analyze digital conflict dynamics and design responses that fit local conditions. Crowd-sourced fact-checking systems, such as Community Notes-style corrections, also show promise when they add context to misleading posts. But these tools must be fast, transparent, and carefully evaluated, since falsehoods often spread before corrections catch up.

Much more could be done to make media a problem solver, rather than a problem creator. Newsrooms could routinely ask whether their conflict coverage increases understanding or merely intensifies outrage. Social media companies could give more weight to credibility, context, bridge-building, and constructive engagement, instead of treating attention as the only measure of value. Schools and civic groups could teach media literacy as a conflict skill, helping people recognize manipulative framing, dehumanizing language, and emotionally addictive content. Philanthropies and public institutions could support local journalism, moderated online forums, and public-interest media that are not dependent on outrage for survival. None of this means turning media into propaganda for peace. It means asking media to do their democratic job better: informing the public, widening the range of voices heard, clarifying real choices, and helping people face hard conflicts without making them worse.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.