Social Networking Sites

Using Social Media to
Tackle Intolerance
LITERATURE REVIEW
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is running an experimental action research pilot project, funded by Open
Society Foundations (OSF), which seeks to understand the potential impact of social media on attitudes and intolerance in Europe. This literature review has been produced to summarise existing knowledge on the role of social media in influencing social attitudes, particularly in relation to inter-group dynamics. Published in April 2012, this review also includes a number of recent case studies from the social media and campaigning sector. © Institute for Strategic
Dialogue, 2012. The Institute is registered with the Charity Commission as Trialogue Educational Trust, Charity
No. 1076660.
What is social media?
There is a little doubt that any organization aiming to shape or challenge the way that people behave and think needs to attend to the possibilities created by what we tend to refer to as “social media”, as it plays an ever-more central role in our everyday lives (Rainie et al,
2006). The term itself can be a confused one, sometimes used as a synonym for social networks, but really encompassing a wider group of applications that aim to change the way that people interact with online content and, by association, with one another.
One common definition – found appropriately, amongst other places, on the knowledge-sharing site Wikipedia - is offered by Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein who define it as, "a group Using Social Media to Tackle Intolerance | Literature Review
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Institute for Strategic Dialogue | Literature Review of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content”
(Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). In other words, social media has been integral to changing the internet from a space which was in

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