Helena Puig Larrauri, co-founder of Build Up.
Build Up
Ashoka Fellow Helena Puig Larrauri co-founded the peace-building organization Build Up, which works with NGOs, UN agencies, and multilateral organizations all over the world to use technology to strengthen the social fabric between citizens. Build Up is active in countries like Syria, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Mali – and also in the U.S. I caught up with her via zoom to learn more.
Helena, over the last 3 years, in the U.S., you have examined how conflict plays itself out in the digital space, namely on social media. What have you learned?
So many things, but here’s one key insight: The majority of people aren’t driving polarization, it is happening to them and they may not be aware of it. This is the group that our work targets. In the US, the debate on social media is polarized quite clearly along partisan lines and connected to electoral issues of different kinds – key words are immigration, gun control recession, trade war, abortion … probably all not surprising to you. These lines of conflict existed in the offline world for a long time, but the difference for most people is that 10 years ago they were playing out occasionally, at Thanksgiving dinners, nowadays there’s a livestream of polarizing content daily on Facebook, which amplifies tensions drastically, exacerbated by what certain algorithms promote.
And what do you do?
We are not after the instigators who start hate, or their core-followers. We are working with those who are getting stuck in hashtags, start to retweet certain handles, start to follow certain sets of people, and are increasingly getting exposed to a hateful, narrow, excluding dynamic. We have an automated process that identifies these people, it sends them a message or ad that targets them – a prompt that is meant to encourage them to reflect on the conversation they are in. “Are you aware you’re in a polarized conversation?“ Not in these words, but that’s the sentiment.
And do people respond?
Yes. And when they do, one of our facilitators, i.e. a human being, takes over and engages with them in a conversation that aims to model how to have a civic conversation. That is a key experience for anyone to have, but very often, our target group feels they don’t have this experience. One of our facilitators wrote in an evaluation report that one of his most memorable conversations was with a man who used the hashtag #MAGA (Make America Great Again). In the original engagement tweet, the facilitator had asked him what this hashtag meant to him. He replied with what it meant to him and then said, “You may be the first person in two years to actually ask me what it means to me.'”
What behavior change are you trying to get to?
For any kind of peace and bridge building online or offline, you cannot shut the other side down. You cannot just take content away. Peace builders have to let everyone experience what it’s like to be listened to – that is what can eventually change behavior. Our facilitators act as guides, coaches and bridge builders – they connect social media users to conversations that otherwise wouldn’t happen, expose them to other voices and resources, and work on eliciting a change in discourse around shared values of civility and respect. If we can achieve this at scale, then we will contribute to a healthier political system and society in the U.S.
Judgementalism on the liberal end is probably not helpful, right?
Being overly judgemental doesn’t help. Because whatever side you’re on, the other side represents people with whom you need to live. If you’re liberal, you’ve got to get to work. The work is building bridges. It’s not burying or silencing people who don’t agree with you. I know it’s difficult. And I understand why many people will say, I’m not going to explain myself to these haters. I accept it, but someone has to do that work, and we need to help ourselves do the work. I’m queer, and I understand queer people who say they don’t want to have a conversation with people who express homophobia. But someone has to do the work.
Are you saying get engaged around the issues that trigger you least?
I’m saying someone has to do the work. And that it is a very, very personal issue. I personally don’t mind engaging with homophobes, perhaps because I’ve lived through enough homophobia that at this point it’s just par for the course. And I’m saying that it is totally acceptable, to say, “I’m not explaining my queerness” or for that matter “I’m not explaining race to white people. ” I get that, it’s a personal choice. Still, people have been doing the work of building unexpected connections for a long time. It’s just that now we also have to do it on social media.
And it’s so difficult.
Yes, let me illustrate further. If you work in human rights, it’s critical to work on taking down hate speech. At the same time, what hate speech says to me is: this society is sick. It’s a signal. If we take down hate speech, but do nothing else to address its roots, the only thing we’re doing is burying the signal. And here’s my view as a peace builder: Don’t bury the signal. Engage in the signal. This has a parallel to offline peace building. Retributive justice demands that we convict criminals of war; restorative justice that we engage criminals of war in a dialogue for our society to heal. It’s the same story in the digital world. We know that if you take down hate speech on social media, it just goes somewhere else. It goes from Facebook to Reddit, or it goes somewhere that’s a lot more hidden. To heal, we have to engage with the people who speak hate.
It seems all peace-building has a digital component now.
Totally. When we started Build Up, there were peace builders, and there was us, this tiny little niche working with digital technology. Nowadays, digital peace building is just peace building. It’s a big shift in mediation. One of the high level mediators we’ve worked with said more or less “I just wish I could slam the door on all this technology and I could go back to closed door conversations, because every time I try to have a secret negotiation, it leaks on Twitter.“
And what did you say?
I said: “It’s over. That time is over. Just let it go.” We must engage with this new reality. And of course, it has a lot of political implications. If you know that anyone can tweet about what’s going on, then you can’t rely on secret meetings in Geneva to the same extent anymore.
So then how do we manage this new reality, where political mediation is permeated by the digital era?
It’s a big step away from top-down, paternalistic peace making behind doors that was historically largely dominated by existing power brokers. In Colombia, for instance, there were closed conversations between the Government and the FARC for a peace agreement, and when the agreement was put to a referendum, it failed. Closed conversations helped reach an agreement, but part of the reason the referendum failed was that those conversations were closed. They failed because they didn’t bring people along. The officials had traveled too far in the negotiation without consulting people who were heavily affected by the resulting decision. We no longer live in an era where people believe in paternalistic solutions to their problems. If citizens are not part of creating the solution, they don’t buy it. And everyone has a social media megaphone and can shout their dissatisfaction into the world.
Which brings us almost full circle to the beginning of our conversation, the need to engage across differences on social media. Technology is like a coin with two sides: It exacerbates differences, but it also facilitates a world where everyone can contribute to and inform decisions.
Absolutely. The bulk of our work, whether it is in Yemen, Syria, Mali, Sudan, Kenya, or the US, is using technology as a tool to include and engage citizens in the process of peacemaking. And we’re seeing very clearly now what we didn’t perhaps see as clearly 5 years ago: that technology is also tooling us. As the clock has fundamentally changed humanity’s understanding of time, digital technology has started to fundamentally shape how we understand and navigate our identities. The human experience is deeply conditioned by technology.
Helena Puig Larrauri has over a decade of experience advising and supporting UN agencies, multilateral organisations and NGOs working in conflict contexts and polarized environments. She specializes in the integration of digital technology and innovation processes to peace processes. Helena is a director and co-founder of Build Up. She previously served on the Boards of International Alert, ImpactHub Barcelona and the Stand-by Task Force, and currently serves on the Boards of Public Sentiment and Elva Community Engagement. She holds a Master in Public Affairs (Economics) from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and a Bachelor’s degree from Oxford University. She was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 2018.
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