Tim Paradis

And we've seen that in Syria, there was quite more a bit of a fatigue in terms of the attention span of users.

So we really tried to do a longitudinal analysis where we looked at close to eight to 10 years of data, looking also to what extent events that sparked or worse or historical markers.

And so we had multiple thousand tweets, over 5,000 tweets for both cases, more so in the Syrian analysis, but we cleaned a lot of the

the data and the content so that we'd have a meaningful engagement with these users, the content, and what then happened on the ground.

And what we realized, and this is what Eric mentioned in the beginning, the online is directly collected to the offline, meaning if the government or institutions really promote a certain hashtag and then the

hits the nerve of the public or the communities that are using this, it can work hand in hand with meaningful measures on the ground.

But the platforms in and of themselves cannot replace institutions.

And this is what you said, David, in terms of the high level of high politics or the high diplomatic levels versus what's happening on the ground.

And I can maybe have Eric say a few words here about then what that means for victims in terms of getting a platform to speak and raise their voices.

That's a great question.

I think that slacktivism can't be ignored.

But in our case, we've seen, for instance, that what I mentioned earlier in Syria, because of the really protracted conflict, there was a fatigue and there were spikes.

We saw clear spikes when there were different events happening.

And unfortunately, then at times it dipped and the conflict on the ground was still ongoing.

And that's certainly to the detriment to the victims and the people on the ground.

And yet, as I mentioned earlier, in Canada...

These CSOs, civil society organizations, alongside the government, have or were able to sustain some of these campaigns, whether that's through hashtags like Every Child Matters or sort of like the Truth and Reconciliation tagline.

And I think the takeaway here for policymakers would be that they shouldn't treat digital activism as accidental or informal.

And they need to be ready to sort of also invest in these forms of information sharing.

And while I think Eric mentioned that social media cannot really stop atrocities on its own, without these social media platforms, we wouldn't even know about some of the atrocities or denial as well as ignoring some of these are certainly much easier.