About the Report

Part of the Blogs and Bullets series of publications from 

the Center of Innovation for Science, Technology, and 

Peacebuilding, this special report follows an earlier study by 

the authors—“Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious 

Politics” (Peaceworks No. 65)—and is informed by the 

proceedings from a conference on the same topic held at 

USIP on July 8, 2010. The authors are particularly indebted to 

Sheldon Himelfarb of the Centers of Innovation for his support 

and contributions. Sean Aday is an associate professor of 

media and public affairs and international affairs at the George 

Washington University (GWU), and director of the Institute 

for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. Henry Farrell 

is an associate professor of political science and international 

affairs at GWU. Marc Lynch is an associate professor of political 

science and international affairs at GWU and director of the 

Institute for Middle East Studies. John Sides is an assistant 

professor of political science at GWU. The authors thank 

Morgan Dibble, program assistant for GWU’s Institute for Public 

Diplomacy and Global Communication, for his assistance in 

putting on the July 8, 2010, Blogs and Bullets conference.

1200 17th Street NW • Washington, DC 20036 • 202.457.1700 • fax 202.429.6063

Special Report 250 September 2010

© 2010 by the United States Institute of Peace. 

All rights reserved.

Sean Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, and John Sides

Advancing New Media 

Research

Summary

•	 New media are powerful but have mixed effects on political organizations. To identify these 

consequences, we need to continue devising new frameworks of analysis. 

•	 Knowing more about how new media relate to each other and to traditional media is critical. 

•	 Being sensitive to the differences between, and relationships among, the various kinds of 

new media is also important. Blogs are different from text messages, and both are different 

from social networking sites. Categorizing these media in terms of their form and likely 

consequences would help advance research and policy.

•	 The consequences of new media for political polarization are especially important. Understanding when new media can have the one or the other consequence is key to future 

research and policy.

•	 Better research tools are urgently needed. Although some highly promising tools exist, they 

need to be developed so that they can parse languages other than English. New tools that 

can identify the tone of communication would help greatly but would also require major 

technological advances.

•	 The disparity between publicly available data on new media and those held by private 

companies (or, in some cases, publicly owned companies in other countries) is considerable. 

Public-private partnerships, or initiatives sponsored by well-respected nongovernmental 

bodies, are needed to create frameworks that would allow research on the consequences 

of new media.

•	 Studying new media raises a host of complex questions about privacy and accountability. 

Policy measures, such as encouraging actors to use new media in nondemocratic regimes, 

raise even more serious questions. Ethical guidelines for new media research and policy are 

badly needed. 

United States Institute of Peace www.usip.org

SPECIAL REPORT

Contents

Introduction 2

New Media: Powerful but Ambiguous 2

Developing Better Research Tools 4

Working with Private Actors 5

Addressing Ethical Issues 6

Conclusions 7
2

Introduction

The debate about the political effects of new media has been dominated by an overly 

general clash between cyber-optimists and pessimists. A more rigorous way of thinking 

about the possible effects of new media on political conflict suggests five distinct levels 

of analysis: individual attitudes and competencies; intergroup relations, such as polarization or bridge-building; collective action, such as protest activity or electoral mobilization; 

regime responses; and external attention. This report seeks to generate new directions for 

new media research and policy. 

New Media: Powerful but Ambiguous

The research and policy community is ready to move on from the tired debate over whether 

new media help or hurt the spread of democracy in some universal sense. Overly optimistic 

statements by politicians in the 1990s and early 2000s have given way to a sober and cautious assessment of new media’s consequences. Policymakers such as Alec Ross make it clear 

that the various new media can be important tools for foreign policy and civil society, but 

can just as easily have harmful and perverse consequences. New media, like the traditional 

media before them, are not hardwired for either dictatorship or democracy. They can be used 

by anyone. The long-term political consequences of such tools are difficult to discern.

If debate is to move on to more fruitful topics, attention needs to turn to the mechanisms through which new media can lead to social and political change. This means that 

questions will be narrower than those previously debated. Sometimes it will be more 

difficult to connect them to the outcomes that policymakers would like. One cannot, for 

example, easily say whether broader Internet access will lead to the spread of democracy. 

What can be done, presuming that better data is gathered, is to provide better answers to 

more specific questions.

Describing ways in which new media can affect contentious politics helps shift debate 

from a fruitless back-and-forth over fundamentally unanswerable questions to a more specific set of arguments over the consequences of new media. If other frameworks emerge, 

they should traverse the same intellectual terrain, and with the same level of specificity. 

This, in itself, is an important contribution to debate.

During related discussion, one important new set of relationships emerged that had not 

been theorized in the conceptual framework arrived at in our earlier report. The framework is 

fundamentally actor-centered, yet some important causal relationships are not. For example, 

the development of new media might plausibly lead to greater economic growth by making 

it easier for businesses to coordinate with each other or for information about prices to 

spread to previously isolated populations. This may in turn have consequences for democracy: a large literature argues that a country’s level of economic development affects the 

likelihood that it can sustain democracy. These kinds of macro-level causal relationships are 

poorly handled by an actor-centered conceptual framework but may be important. Stretching the existing framework to include them would likely create a framework too loose to be 

useful. Instead, alternative frameworks might provide different perspectives and point to 

different useful questions to ask.

Understanding relations between and among media

New media are increasingly important, but coexist with other channels of communication, 

ranging from the primitive (posters and samizdat-style news-sheets) to the relatively sophisticated. When thinking about the consequences of new media, we therefore cannot treat 

them in isolation. Sometimes other media may be more important or more robust. It may be 

The views expressed in this report do not necessarily 

reflect the views of the United States Institute of Peace, 

which does not advocate specific policy positions.

To request permission to photocopy or reprint materials, 

e-mail: permissions@usip.org

About the Institute

The United States Institute of Peace is an independent, 

nonpartisan institution established and funded by Congress. 

Its goals are to help prevent and resolve violent conflicts, 

promote post-conflict peacebuilding, and increase conflict 

management tools, capacity, and intellectual capital worldwide. The Institute does this by empowering others with 

knowledge, skills, and resources, as well as by its direct 

involvement in conflict zones around the globe.

Board of Directors

J. Robinson West (Chair), Chairman, PFC Energy, Washington, 

D.C. • George E. Moose (Vice Chairman), Adjunct Professor 

of Practice, The George Washington University, Washington, 

D.C. • Anne H. Cahn, Former Scholar in Residence, American 

University, Washington, D.C. • Chester A. Crocker, James R. 

Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies, School of Foreign 

Service, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. • Ikram U. 

Khan, President, Quality Care Consultants, LLC., Las Vegas, 

Nev. • Kerry Kennedy, Human Rights Activist • Stephen D. 

Krasner, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford University • Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor 

of Law, George Mason University, Arlington, Va. • Judy Van 

Rest, Executive Vice President, International Republican 

Institute, Washington, D.C. • Nancy Zirkin, Executive Vice 

President, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights 

Members Ex Officio

Michael H. Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for 

Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor • James N. Miller, 

Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy •

Ann E. Rondeau, Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy; President, 

National Defense University • Richard H. Solomon, 

President, United States Institute of Peace (nonvoting) 
3

easier for a hostile regime to block access to Facebook during a period of social turmoil than 

to stop people from putting fliers on lamp-posts. Moreover, new media such as Twitter are 

still elite phenomena. Their consequences are likely to be greater if they diffuse messages 

that are taken up by traditional mass media, such as satellite television, that are available to 

a wider audience. Even those new media that have achieved widespread penetration—such 

as Facebook, with 500 million members, and YouTube—are often eclipsed by traditional 

broadcast television, radio, and newspapers.

Thus it is important not to fetishize new media as something unique. This is especially so 

because variations among the types of new media are pronounced. Whereas blogs typically 

(though not universally) have a strong textual component, YouTube and similar services disseminate audiovisual material. Even text-based new media differ. The primary limit to the 

length of a blogpost is the presumed attention span of the reader. Twitter, by contrast, has 

a hard 140-character limit. Phone-based text messages do not have such limits, but often 

do have associated pricing schemes and technical limitations (such as screen size) that 

encourage brevity.

An important task for future work is to create a taxonomy of both old and new media 

forms, examining the kinds of content they favor, the ways in which they allow authors to 

present that content, the forms of distribution they rely on, and the extent to which they 

allow feedback. This would allow researchers, policymakers, and activists to think more 

clearly about the likely consequences of different forms of media. For example, SMS messages (where they are not blocked) could prove more effective than blogposts in managing 

protests and demonstrations on the fly. SMS enables actors to easily compose and immediately send short text messages to an unlimited number of recipients, who may then forward 

them on as need be to even more people. SMS thus provides the flexibility necessary to 

respond appropriately to rapidly changing conditions on the ground. Blogposts, however, 

could prove more likely to influence media elites and hence spread complex ideas. Blogs 

allow for more lengthy development and expression of ideas and arguments, and are or can 

be easily read and excerpted by others who may then respond to the ideas, perhaps helping 

to refine them, in their own blogs or in another format. The various new media are therefore 

likely to have different consequences for social and political conflict. Additionally, certain 

new media may even resemble traditional media more than other new media.

Dealing with political and social polarization

New media can affect social conflict in many ways. One of the most important—and 

understudied—is political polarization. Evidence from the United States suggests that new 

media can lead to greater polarization in two ways. First, it may help individuals belonging to certain social groups identify and associate each other to the exclusion of others, 

a process known as homophily. Second, it may cause individuals within particular groups 

to harden their identities and form negative opinions about other groups. These negative 

opinions may be stickier because opportunities for cross-group social interaction in which 

negative stereotypes can be broken down are fewer.

The debate in U.S. politics about how much polarization has occurred and what is 

driving it is lively. The consequences of polarization within other countries—especially 

nondemocracies and frail democracies—may be considerably more dramatic, however. If 

new media help foster polarization, then they may threaten stability and contribute to 

intergroup hostility and conflict. If, however, new media can be engineered to encourage 

friendly interaction between members of different groups, then they may help cement 

peace rather than undermine it.

The various new media are 

therefore likely to have different 

consequences for social and 

political conflict. Additionally, 

certain new media may even 

resemble traditional media more 

than other new media.
4

There is some supporting evidence for both arguments. Two experiences involving the 

same technology (Facebook) and “frozen” conflicts in the same region led to opposite results. 

In one case, an activist found himself able to use Facebook to build new friendships across 

the divide. This was in part because he had signaled his willingness to criticize his own 

government’s inappropriate behavior. In another case, an activist found his efforts to build 

community ties rapidly shut down by angry nationalist rhetoric and hostile interventions. In 

this case, the two groups arguably ended up further apart than before. These very different 

outcomes could simply be the product of chance variation; social processes of trust-building 

may be statistically noisy and difficult to predict. Moving beyond anecdotes to a large number of cases can better establish when new media do and do not polarize citizens.

Developing Better Research Tools

To explore the consequences of new media, new research tools are needed. Valuable tools 

are available, but none of them yet accommodate a variety of languages and social contexts. 

Investment is needed to expand these tools’ capabilities.

Content analysis

New media researchers’ most basic need is to know what is being discussed and by whom. 

Media Cloud is one of a number of technologies that simplify assessing such trends over 

large datasets, as opposed to the painful hand-coding that has long been typical of content 

analysis. But it still lacks the modules that would allow it to be applied to societies at risk of 

conflict. Media Cloud needs to be several things simultaneously: comprehensive, to capture 

the appropriate universe of speakers; multilingual, to capture content in all the languages 

relevant to the conflict in question; and longitudinal, to show changes over time. Policymakers such as Alec Ross emphasize the need for longitudinal data. To date, Media Cloud 

has been applied only to U.S. media sources, though a Russian language module is being 

developed. Researchers need more language modules, and quickly, so that they can map out 

a comprehensive picture of the important speakers, and begin to collect longitudinal data 

on these speakers. The need for language modules in Arabic, Chinese, Urdu, and Persian is 

especially urgent.

Sentiment analysis

To study contentious politics, it is not enough to know that certain issues or personalities 

are being discussed. The valence is also important: Are Sunni Iraqis mentioning Shi’a in the 

context of calls for sectarian massacre or of appeals for sectarian unity? Is a spike in online 

discussion of Israel in the Arab blogosphere about the prospect of peace or war? Sentiment 

analysis, unfortunately, has proven extremely difficult, with few specialists claiming better 

than 60 percent reliability, which is not enough for the purposes here. Recent efforts to 

build neural networks—artificial intelligence that can learn to decode the flow of conversation, could revolutionize this sphere—but such technologies do not yet seem to be available 

to researchers. This is a longer-term challenge for research—one that could benefit from 

substantial government investment.

Meme-tracking

Showing how ideas spread through a communication network is also crucial. Identifying, 

for example, how an incendiary rumor originated and then spread—and where its diffusion 

failed—would allow for more effective intervention to prevent conflict. MemeTracker, a 

To explore the consequences of 

new media, new research tools 

are needed. Valuable tools are 

available, but none of them 

yet accommodate a variety of 

languages and social contexts. 
5

project run by scholars at Stanford and Cornell Universities, provides an important new tool 

that can not only track the spread of memes, but also show how they mutate over time. 

This could help policymakers identify the key interlocutors in given conversations. These, 

of course, may not always be the most visible activists. MemeTracker, however, is currently 

equipped to handle only English-language sources. A multilingual MemeTracker or similar 

program would enable genuinely new forms of research, such as discovering how memes 

change when they are translated across languages.

Linkage patterns

Knowing who is talking to whom, through the study of links across blogs or other platforms, 

facilitates the study of polarization, bridge-building, and the effects of social connections. 

Morningside Analytics has produced fascinating maps of the Persian and Arabic blogospheres, and others have mapped the U.S. political blogosphere. Current link analyses are 

typically snapshots, however. They examine the network at a particular moment in time or 

at only a few moments over a longer period. Analyses of linkage patterns over time would 

allow us to see how linkage patterns respond to events, as well as any secular trends in 

contact among social groups. 

Data visualization

Both researchers and policymakers would benefit from tools that made it easier to visualize these new relationships. It is already clear how simple forms of visualization, such as 

wordclouds, illuminate the analysis of textual data. Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle program, 

and his presentation of the differences and similarities between different texts (such as 

State of the Union addresses), provides one model for how to do this. However, more study 

is needed to visualize the complex relationships that meme proliferation, linkage patterns, 

and sentiments produce.

Finally, new ways of systematically combining data generated by these tools, as well as 

by more traditional data sources, such as economic time series and surveys, are also critical. 

Equally important is how to combine these data with more qualitative approaches, such as 

those of cultural sociologists, constructivist political scientists, and anthropologists. All of 

this will require a major research impetus. Various bodies, including the U.S. government 

and the World Bank, have a demonstrated interest in applying and combining these tools 

to investigate mechanisms of social and political change. However, no single initiative or 

group of initiatives yet exists to coordinate these interests and thereby create a coherent 

set of new tools.

Working with Private Actors

One key issue is the difficulty in obtaining data. The problem is not that such data do not exist, 

but that the largest and most important bodies of data are not publicly available. Instead, 

they are held by private businesses and state-owned telecommunications companies. These 

organizations are often reluctant to provide access to their data, for three reasons. 

First, the data are often a key source of commercial advantage. Companies such as 

Google have shown themselves adept at using private data they have collated to create 

an edge over their competitors. Other companies have business models that are based on 

providing selective and limited access to this data to their commercial partners. Second, 

companies worry about privacy and reputational concerns. Previous instances of generosity to academia, such as America Online’s willingness to share extensive search data with 
6

external researchers, have backfired when it has turned out to be possible to identify the 

people carrying out specific searches. Damage to reputation and potential legal liability 

in privacy-friendly jurisdictions such as the European Union make businesses reluctant 

to provide access to data. Finally, some businesses, especially state-owned businesses in 

regimes hostile to the United States, will obviously be unlikely to provide data for national 

security reasons.

Limited data availability presents obvious problems for public research. Researchers tend 

to focus their efforts on platforms—such as blogs and Twitter—where it is relatively easy 

to scrape data. But these are not necessarily the most important platforms for certain kinds 

of political activity. For example, we know very little beyond anecdotes about the political 

uses and consequences of cell phone text messaging, but can plausibly expect it to matter. 

After all, text messaging is the primary method of communication for many young people. 

Researchers may face the proverbial challenge of the drunk searching for his house keys 

under the lamp post, not because he thinks that the keys are there, but because the area 

around the lamp is the only place where he can see anything.

This problem is difficult to solve. Governments and respected NGOs, however, can at least 

alleviate the situation through public-private partnerships. Here, http:peace.facebook.com 

serves as an interesting example. Facebook has worked with the Peace Innovation initiative at Stanford to provide aggregate data on Facebook friendships across difficult ethnic 

boundaries. Certain risks are of course associated with such cooperative projects. There may 

be a tendency toward selection bias. Businesses may be considerably more enthusiastic to 

share data that burnish their corporate image than data that suggest, for example, that their 

sites facilitate insalubrious forms of political mobilization. Drawing inferences from such 

data would be at best problematic. Nevertheless, with appropriate safeguards, joint projects 

could help provide data that would otherwise be unavailable.

Addressing Ethical Issues

Finally, it is important to note the real ethical issues for both researchers and policymakers, 

and that these have only begun to receive sustained attention. Social scientists, as a general rule, are hungry for good data. New media provide data that may help social scientists 

answer many important questions about the relationship between tools of communication 

and political and social outcomes. Policymakers and activists are interested in changing 

societies, and sometimes do not pay attention to the unintended consequences of their 

actions. 

Three cases may serve to indicate the general issues. One involves Pete Warden, a programmer who recently discovered a way to surreptitiously scrape Facebook data and map out 

a large corpus of information. This information could have been used for many legitimate 

social science purposes, but it could just as easily have been used to identify networks of 

dissidents, members of sexual minorities, or others who might want to protect their privacy. After a threatened lawsuit from Facebook for breach of its terms of service, Warden 

destroyed the dataset. The second involves a member of this project, who wrote a widely 

read article identifying bloggers belonging to a dissident group in a nondemocratic country. 

As both the author and the bloggers feared, publication of the article led to the arrest and 

harsh interrogation of the bloggers. The third involves the massive outpouring of foreign 

support for Iranians from American and European bloggers and Twitter users. This support 

may have encouraged dissidents in Iran to risk retaliation from the regime in the belief that 

they had support from abroad. Although this belief was justified, the support was primarily 

moral rather than practical, and not necessarily useful to those later arrested and tried.

It is important to note the 

real ethical issues for both 

researchers and policymakers, 

and that these have only begun 

to receive sustained attention.
7

The point here is not that there are any easy or obvious answers to the ethical dilemmas 

in research on new media and in policies guided by research. Instead, researchers need to 

start thinking about the basic principles that should guide them. It is essential to include 

not only policy practitioners and researchers but also ethicists and human rights experts in 

formulating ethical rules.

Conclusions

We know how the new media could matter. The challenge is figuring out whether they do. 

To answer this question, scholars and policymakers need new tools. The first step is to begin 

counting—or at least counting in novel ways. Being able to identify who is talking, what 

they are saying, who they are talking to, and therefore how ideas are spreading provides 

the building blocks for a fuller account of new media’s potential. The process, however, must 

somehow also manage to protect the privacy—and security—of the individuals being identified. This is a delicate needle to thread, as controversies regarding Facebook and Google 

have shown, to say nothing of the way in which regimes like that in Iran have persecuted 

bloggers and other users of social media. The most accurate account must draw on a range 

of relevant cases—ones that capture new media’s power as well as its impotence, and its 

potential for alleviating or exacerbating conflicts. These cases in turn demand tools that 

work in multiple languages and that continually acquire and update the data they gather, 

constructing a richer longitudinal portrait of conflicted societies. Developing these tools 

is a task best suited to direct and indirect collaborations, both large and small, among 

researchers, businesses, and governments. New tools and better data will give policymakers 

the answers they need to execute truly successful twenty-first century statecraft: one that 

best leverages new media to promote democracy, economic development, and the successful 

resolution and prevention of conflict.

We know how the new media 

could matter. The challenge is 

figuring out whether they do. 
Other Publications of Interest

•	 Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics by Sean Aday, Henry Farrell, Marc Lynch, 

John Sides, John Kelly, and Ethan Zuckerman (Peaceworks, September 2010)

•	 Preventing Media Incitement to Violence in Iraq by Theo Dolan (Peace Brief, April 2010) 

•	 Media and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan by Sheldon Himelfarb (Peace Brief, March 2010)

•	 Managing Public Information in a Mediation Process by Ingrid A. Lehmann (Peacemaker’s 

Toolkit, 2009)

•	 Media and Conflict: Afghanistan as a Relative Success Story by Yll Bajraktari and Christine 

Parajon (Special Report, January 2008)

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