How Social Media Impacts Collective Understandings of War

How does the prevalence and ubiquity of social media impact and change perceptions of global conflict in the 21st century?

In the last 20 years, conflict and war have unfolded in real time on our phone screens and across social media. While historically information and images of war were filtered through space and time before winding up in the public eye, today we all are in constant and immediate proximity to conflict through social media. How has this shifted public perception of conflict, warfare, and the governments engaging in it? What impact, personally, does access to this imagery and information have on the average citizen? How has social media given rise to new forms of protest for and partcicipation in decisions around how countries engage in conflict?

Here to unpack this issue and answer your questions is Renee DiResta, the Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Renee investigates the spread of narratives across social and media networks, with an interest in understanding how platform algorithms and affordances intersect with user behavior and factional crowd dynamics. She studies how actors leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence, from domestic activists promoting health misinformation and conspiracy theories, to the full-spectrum information operations executed by state actors.

She investigates the spread of malign narratives across social networks, and assists policymakers in understanding and responding to the problem. She has advised Congress, the State Department, and other academic, civic, and business organizations, and has studied disinformation and computational propaganda in the context of pseudoscience conspiracies, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare.