Publication

This Peace Brief grapples with an interesting question -- what are the implications of depending on social media sources for your news, especially in conflict zones where journalists have limited access? To explore this question in detail, the brief analyzes how social media data has been used in the Syrian Civil War, where the external verification of stories indeed remains difficult. It concludes that social media has helped overcome distortions in reporting, but very real problems still have to be overcome before it can reliably present conflict dynamics as they actually are.