Peacebuilding in the Digital Age

When Online Narratives Become Real-World Risks

We tend to think of peacebuilding in terms of preventing violence, resolving disputes and  bringing divided communities together.

Increasingly, however, conflict begins - or is  intensified - somewhere much less visible: on our phones. 

Two recent pieces of research involving the South African peacebuilding organisation  Tales of Turning provide an important insight into this emerging dimension of peace and  security. Together, they illustrate both sides of the problem: how social media can amplify  division and potentially contribute to real-world conflict, and how relatively simple  interventions can help disrupt that process. 

Turning genuine grievances into division 

The first study examined anti-foreign-national narratives circulating on South African social  media during the month leading up to protests on 30 June 2026. 

One of its most important findings is that effective disinformation does not necessarily  begin with something completely false. 

Instead, it can attach itself to genuine concerns. Unemployment, crime, inadequate  public services, housing pressures and frustration with government are real issues. The  danger arises when these grievances are manipulated so that responsibility for complex  social problems is transferred to an easily identifiable group. 

In this case, foreign nationals became the target. 

The research identified a familiar but powerful process: society is divided into “us” and  “them”. South Africans are portrayed as patriots, taxpayers and law-abiding citizens  whose interests are being ignored. Foreign nationals are portrayed as competitors for jobs  and resources, criminals or even “invaders”. 

The circle of supposed enemies can then widen. Government departments, police,  journalists, trade unions and human-rights organisations may themselves be portrayed as  betraying ordinary citizens because they challenge the narrative or defend the rights of  foreigners.

The language used is particularly significant. Hostility does not always present itself openly  as xenophobia. It can instead be reframed as patriotism, protection of national  sovereignty, law enforcement or constitutional duty. 

That makes the narrative more socially acceptable and potentially more difficult for  automated content-moderation systems to recognise. 

Creating the appearance of consensus 

The research also points to the importance of coordination and amplification. 

Tales of Turning's earlier network analysis found evidence that 27% of the anti-foreign national narrative examined on public social media formed part of a coordinated  disinformation network. 

A variety of techniques can increase the apparent popularity of a message: repeated  text across multiple accounts, coordinated hashtags, high-volume reposting, emotionally  charged videos, deliberate tagging of political and media accounts, and language  designed to evade automated moderation. 

The result can be an illusion of spontaneous public consensus. 

A relatively small number of highly active accounts can help make a particular  interpretation of events appear much more widespread than it initially is. 

Once ordinary  users begin repeating the message themselves, the distinction between coordinated  manipulation and genuine public opinion becomes increasingly difficult to see.

This is where a digital phenomenon becomes a peace and security concern. 

Online hostility can reinforce prejudice, undermine confidence in government and the  media, polarise communities and help create an environment in which confrontation and  violence become more likely. 

Can we interrupt the process? 

A second piece of research provides a more encouraging answer. During South Africa's  highly contested 2024 election, trained volunteers intervened when questionable  information appeared on social media.

But rather than simply declaring that a post was false — or attacking the person who had  posted it — they asked simple questions designed to encourage people to think about  what they were seeing. 

These interventions, known as Social Truth Queries, included questions such as: How do you  know this is true? What evidence supports this claim? 

The idea is deceptively simple: introduce a moment of reflection before misinformation is  accepted and shared. 

The results were striking. 

In a study of 125 posts on X, posts receiving these interventions experienced 77% fewer  likes and 82% fewer reposts. Two additional experiments involving 1,607 participants found  that the questions also reduced perceptions that the misinformation was accurate and  that the people spreading it were trustworthy. 

Timing mattered. The earlier the intervention occurred, the greater its apparent effect. 

The implication is important. Countering misinformation does not necessarily require  censorship, confrontation or sophisticated technological solutions. Human dialogue itself  can form part of the intervention. 

A Rotary Peace Fellow putting prevention into practice

There is also a direct Rotary International (RI) connection to this work. 

Jenna-Lee Strugnell, founder and Executive Director of Tales of Turning, is a Rotary Peace  Fellow. During her Fellowship at the Otto and Fran Walter Rotary Peace Center at  Bahçeşehir University, she developed a Social Change Initiative focused on digital  peacebuilding in Somalia. 

The initiative used data analysis to develop a better understanding of hate speech and  misinformation. Grassroots organisations were then trained to use these insights for digital  dialogue facilitation aimed at reducing misinformation and hate speech online. 

This provides a particularly good example of what investment in peace education can  produce. The connection between research and action is important: understanding how  harmful narratives spread is only the first step. The ultimate objective is to use that  knowledge to prevent online hostility from contributing to division and violence in the  physical world.

It is also a reminder that the nature of peacebuilding is changing. 

Peace practitioners are no longer concerned only with mediation once tensions become  visible or violence has begun. Increasingly, prevention means identifying the signals that  precede conflict — and some of those signals can now be found in digital networks. 

This offers a tangible example of the wider impact of the Rotary Peace Fellowship  programme. Supporting a Peace Fellow is an investment in an individual, but the  knowledge, initiatives and networks subsequently created can potentially benefit entire  communities. 

From social-media monitoring to early warning

There is a wider implication. 

If rising hostility can be detected online before it becomes violence offline, social-media  analysis can potentially become part of an early-warning system for conflict prevention. 

This does not mean assuming that angry online discussion inevitably produces violence.  Nor should legitimate political grievances be dismissed as misinformation. 

Indeed, the South African research points towards precisely the opposite conclusion.  Genuine grievances must be recognised and addressed. Otherwise they provide fertile  ground for those wishing to manipulate them. 

The challenge is to distinguish legitimate debate from attempts to transform frustration into  scapegoating, polarisation and hostility. 

That requires a combination of technology and human judgement: social-media analysis  capable of detecting emerging patterns; people who understand the communities and  political context involved; and trusted local actors able to intervene constructively. 

The work in South Africa and Somalia suggests a potentially powerful model: detect  harmful narratives → understand what is driving them → equip local organisations to  respond → intervene before digital hostility contributes to physical conflict. 

Why this matters beyond South Africa 

There is a temptation to regard misinformation principally as a problem of social media or  communications. It is much more than that.

When information manipulation exploits existing social divisions, undermines confidence in  institutions, identifies groups to blame and encourages people to act against them, it  becomes a societal resilience and security issue. 

This should matter to organisations concerned with cyber security as much as it does to  peacebuilders. 

Traditional cyber security has understandably concentrated on protecting networks,  systems and data. But societies themselves can also be targets. Information can be  manipulated to exploit their vulnerabilities in much the same way that attackers exploit  vulnerabilities in technology. 

The vulnerability in this case may be unemployment, inequality, distrust of government,  ethnic tension or fear of migration. The attack surface is public opinion.

Social media  provides the means of amplification. 

And the consequences can occur in the physical world. 

A new dimension of peacebuilding 

For Rotary, there is an equally important lesson. 

Rotary's traditional strengths — building trust, encouraging dialogue, connecting  communities and developing people capable of working across divisions — remain highly  relevant. They simply need to be applied to a changing environment. 

The experience of Jenna-Lee Strugnell and Tales of Turning also demonstrates something  important about the Rotary Peace Fellowship itself. Peace Fellows are not simply studying  conflict. They can take what they have learned and apply it to emerging threats, develop  new approaches and equip others to prevent violence. 

In an increasingly connected world, this matters. 

The community in which peace must be built is no longer only the village, town or country  in which we live. 

It is also the digital community we enter every time we open our phones.

Sources and further reading 

Tales of Turning & The Raith Foundation. What Social Media Reveals About Anti-Foreign  National Disinformation and Hate Tactics. 2026. AI-assisted and human-validated analysis  of public social-media data in South Africa collected between 30 May and 30 June 2026.  Social-media data provided by DataEQ. 

Wack, Morgan. A Collaborative Digital Field Study Shows That Community-Led  Interventions Can Minimize Engagement with Online Falsehoods. OSF Preprints, 7 October  2025. Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich.  Research conducted in partnership with Tales of Turning.

Rotary Peace Centers. Digital Peacebuilding in Somalia. Material describing Jenna-Lee  Strugnell's Social Change Initiative as a Rotary Peace Fellow at the Otto and Fran Walter  Rotary Peace Center at Bahçeşehir University in Turkiye, and its application of data  analysis and dialogue facilitation to misinformation and hate speech in Somalia.

The Cambridge Cyber ​​Centre, part of the Richard Knowlton Associates Group, was founded with the mission of contributing to an informed, rigorous, and decision-oriented debate, helping public and private leaders understand digital risk not as an isolated technical problem, but as a structural component of geopolitical resilience. Only by recognizing the systemic nature of the threat will it be possible to develop responses that match the complexity of our times.

See our website for details.