The Commons
The Commons is a US-based program, centering our every day relationships and the digital spaces that impact them. Our goal is to depolarize the United States through strengthened, healed, and humanized relationship-building online. We have two focus areas and opportunities to dive deeper: politics and race. Why these two areas? Both drive evolving and historic identity-based conflicts in the United States.
Where social media can foster the spread of misinformation, discrimination, hate speech, trauma and polarization, we also know that social media can also be used to interrupt harm, deescalate divisive emotions, promote positive examples of peacebuilding, provide additional perspectives, link distributed communities, share resources, and engage in constructive conversations on difficult topics. Ultimately, we know social media can be a place where we can build, repair and deepen relationships.
We talk about this work as building peace in digital spaces. What is exciting is that each of us can play a role in shaping the norms of the United States — and we have a lot of examples and ideas for strategies that can actively engage people.
We invite you to join us:
Learn
In this action-oriented course, we explore the role social media is playing in polarization, and the creative roles social media users (that’s us) can play in depolarization.
Engage
Interested in getting started now? Check out the Digital Peacebuilding Playbook: Social Media for skills, tools, and strategies for your own social media engagement.
Collaborate
Keen to join a diverse community of people committed to the same goal? We’re coordinating and sharing on Facebook.
