The influence of new media on the conflicts and peace process

Introduction

In 1870’s Bismarck shortened and altered a telegram text, then leaked it to the press. The Ems Telegram triggered French and German public opinion and led to war. This historical context has now become a much more complex global structure, fueled by the accelerated flow of information through social media. This historical context and transformation reflect a shift from centralized information systems to decentralized, networked communication structures, fundamentally altering power relations between states and publics.

New media is no longer a passive medium but an active political actor that transforms conflict dynamics, domestic politics, diplomacy and peacebuilding processes by reshaping power relations, information, and political mobilization.

The Era of Total War

Media has an active role especially in war periods. In war periods all sides have an alternative narratives and morals. For instance, The Great War has basically two sides: Allied Powers and Central Powers. Great Britain has declared they defend independent nations (like Belgium) rights and fought for them (Great Speeches of the War, 1915). Also, they defend a civilization against the Huns (German soldiers it was referred to as such in the media). But the other side Germany fought for existence. “Einkreisung” is referred to be surrounded by west (France) and east (Russia). As the speech by Wilhelm II, the sword is being forced into Germany’s hand (Wilhelm II, 1914, p. 210).

During the extraordinary situations like war condition, media is highly controlled by government, leading to what scholars call a 'totalitarian communication environment' where the distinction between news and propaganda disappears (Philip M. Taylor, 2003). In this type of situation, due to the lack of competing narratives, people were often confined within nationalistic echo chambers, accepting state propaganda as the truth. As the Laswell’s (2013) defined it in 1927, this type of symbols (defense of independent nations) creates a manipulation on the people thought media or another propaganda methods. The mobilization of public mind is complete with this way. Yet, global media and TV broadcast changed this circumstance.

The Television Era and The Credibility Gap

World War II isn’t a war that they just fought each other, it’s more than that. World War II creates a technologic war around the world. The war eras have a significant characteristic, and this is increased taxes and war economy. War economy creates an area that technological improvements (Roland, 2016). The important jumping points in history and most of these STEMs from the circumstances about by the war.

1950’s comes with significant development in our lives, the television. Television became a part of daily life and became a center that a lot of people gets information and news. After the television, ordinary people have started to become aware of world politics. Also, television broadcast changed the way many things work. For USA, a tradition was born, presidential debate. USA Elections in 1960 witnessed the first of televised debates. The first Kennedy-Nixon Debate captured over 65 million views. While radio listeners felt Nixon had won, the 65 million television viewers felt the opposite. Influenced by Kennedy’s charismatic presence and they thought Kennedy had won. (Purdue University, n.d.). This marked the beginning of a tradition where visual narration passes the old “sounded” narratives.

Also, these years witnessed lots of things. For instance, Vietnam War. The effect through of TV creates a new reality such as Living Room War. The term of Living Room War refers to the live broadcast of the Vietnam War on television and allows to everyone can see what is going on in Vietnam (Arlen, 1969). So, ordinary people’s start to aware of world politics. This shift marked a structural transformation in public engagement, where visual media undermined official narratives and increased skepticism toward state authority.

After World War II, the number of births worldwide increased rapidly, and a new generation known as the “baby boomers” emerged. Baby boomers are the first generation to saw an actual war condition every dinner on through with TVs. Television broadcast introduced to counter-narrative that challenged official state narrative; by exposing the realities of war. This new narrative fostered a “credibility gap” between the administration and the public (Snow, 2004). This generation, having lost faith in governments and seen the true face of war. In history, almost every action has an outcome. So, the credibility gap has an outcome around the world. The outcome is in everywhere and resulted with protest and uprisings. Generation of 1968 or known as baby boomers, understands the new role of media on their life. “The whole world is watching” is quoted in 1968 Chicago Protests and basically the definition of the worldwide television broadcasts (Gitlin, 1980). The slogan signified that the protests were no longer regional context but had become part of a globally mediated political moment.

From CNN Effect to New Media Effect

The CNN Effect emerged in 1990’s, suggesting that 24-hour real time news coverage could pressure to policy makers to intervene in such as humanitarian crisis (Gilboa, 2005). Also, according to Gilboa (2005) CNN Effect’s definition may vary among scholars. One of the debates are the CNN Effect is really affects policy making process. For instance, scholars like Shaw (1996), claims the media is much more effective than other representative mechanism to represent victims of violence and war. However, the impact of CNN Effect varies depending on the situation. Robinson (2002) assumed if policy objectives are clear and firmly established, media influence on decision making is limited. Other way if policy is uncertain media coverage can influence the process.

A critical failure of media-government relationship occurred in 2003. During the invasion of Iraq, traditional media outlets largely echoed the governments claims regarding Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). As it later transpired, the war had been waged by manufacturing consent (Chomsky & Herman, 1995), without these claims being verified. However, The New York Times posted a paper named: FROM THE EDITORS; The Times and Iraq. This letter compromises a formal apology and admitting that their coverage had been insufficiently skeptical of the intelligence provided by the government (The New York Times, 2004). This event refers to manufacturing consent via media.

Although, early steps of CNN Effect seen in 1960’s but not such an extent. And nowadays this effect changed in many ways. Traditional media presented a relationship between the government and the media as a set of relationships. But “The New Media Effect” gives much more complex and much more developed perspective. New media encompasses digital forms of media and communication, which use computer technology (Harmon, 2024).

The New Media Effects is a new way to identify world and an active political actor that can be enable agenda formation, rapid mobilization and narrative contestation. Through to social media platforms, people have an alternative platform to reach information. The new platform has changed all the mentality behind the getting information. Social media gives an opportunity to be a part of government-media relationship. In age of social media, the people can post anything they want except for those restricted by the government. For an example in 2024, UK Government posted a text that says, “Think before you post.” at X (UK Government, 2024).

Social media has the capacity to become a perform center for social movements. That movements can be organized through the social media platforms, such as contemporary protests. For instance, during the Arab Spring people uses social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook played an active role to mobilizing protesters (Howard & Hussain, 2011). Also, social movements like “BlackLivesMatter” describes the “social” word of social media.

In new era, The CNN Effect increasingly insufficient because the exclusion and failure to consider the public, a third party. The CNN Effect has gatekeepers like editors or governments also consider limited narratives Also, The CNN Effect has been criticized since it did not cause a clear change in policies (Compaine, 2002). The New Media Effect is beyond from The CNN Effect and examined in the next title.

The New Media Effect

The New Media Effect refers to the transformation of publics into active political actors that capable of directly and indirectly influencing conflict dynamics, political discourse, and peace processes through networked digital platforms. However, The New Media Effect faces the challenge of integrating complex relationships that anyone can join by one “click” so, The New Media Effect refers mainly the third party also known as people. Differ between earlier media effects and New Media Effect is participation of people. So, the involvement of society has become a digital manifestation of the popular movements that have been ongoing since the past.

In traditional media systems, narratives are filtered by gatekeepers also known as institutional actors such as governments, editors, journalists, also elites. Media influence operated through channels that ruling by elites but with the digitalization this situation changed. But social media allow individuals, non-state actors and such as. This decentralization weakens the state’s monopoly on news and enables the other narratives. Decentralization changed the gatekeepers of media, in the digital age established new gatekeepers such as algorithms.

The New Media that through the social media has a differ from traditional media. This differ is participation of people and mobilization speed which grants by social media platforms. Mobilization speed refers to speed of information has never seen before. Digital platforms enable rapid mobilization by lowering the costs of coordination and engagement. So, the involvement of society has become a digital manifestation of the popular movements that have been ongoing since the past.

Thus, the New Media Effect should be understood as a structural condition of contemporary politics by decentralizing narrative power, information flows, and enabling participatory mobilization, new media transforms conflicts, politics and daily life.

Diplomacy and political thoughts can be influenced by the public of internet. Participation in processes at this scale creates complex consequences. Social media, which will be examined under The New Media Effect, is fundamentally the source of these results. Scholars describes the potential risks of social media like misinformation, polarization through algorithms, radicalization (Tucker et al., 2018).

Social media grants a new way for politics. In age of post-truth, truth became unverifiable and, in a way, insignificant. Post-truth defined as "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." (Oxford, 2016). The relationship between this concept and social media is the incredible acceleration of information flow. Byung-Chul Han (2022) describes the new digital age as a new nihilism that the differ line between the truth and lies is no longer available anymore.

Throughout history, propaganda has been used in various ways, but in today's digital world, even propaganda has taken on a very complex dimension. Arendt (1951) remarks as Hitler is not an ordinary liar. He can tell lies that can creates a new reality. But in digitalized world every viral video, post can create a new reality. This type of new reality has been observed in many processes. For instance, the Sudan conflict further demonstrates how digital media can create new realities, not only through disinformation but also with counterpropaganda. Satellite imagery of dead bodies (CNN, 2025) shared on social media exposed mass violence and atrocities that were initially denied by political authorities. This type of digital information reshaped international perceptions of the conflict, forcing diplomatic actors to reassess their positions also, sometimes not just a political actor and gives new perceptions for the people who that does not know the real situations. An important example about changing political thoughts of people is Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, which will be examined in detail later.

Impacts of Social Media

In today, Internet has 6.04 billion users and social media has an approximate 4.5 billion active users (Statista, 2025). Also, the important part is more than 4 billion people spend 6.5 h a day online (Yousef et al., 2025). Through with this information’s we can conclude social media can effects directly or indirectly on daily life and getting information has become much easier with usage of social media and online news platforms.

Digital information started in early 2000’s but democratizes and participation of “creating” information is spread with social media platforms and blogs. In traditional media, information usually creates with journalist, but his situation changed with new media. New media grants a new look for journalist. Now, journalist aren’t just professionals that profession. Everyone can be a journalist in this age. Some scholars call this phenomenon citizen journalism or participatory journalism, where the boundaries between professional journalists and news users become sometimes invisible (Hendrickx & Opgenhaffen, 2024).

Also, the ease of accessing information, exposure a large amount news without verifying the sources, creates new phenomena such as information overload, rage bait, digital conscience. In 2025, rage bait is selected Word of the Year by Oxford. Rage bait defined as “Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content.” (Oxford, 2025). The importance of this word shows the dangers of social media platforms. For instance, radicalization spread easy through divided people. As we said, everyone can be journalist nowadays and they can spread fake news. So, social media has a difference with traditional media, and this is gatekeepers. If any authority does not meddle this situation these things can be go wrong. If social media platforms do not complete their fact-checking missions sometimes one post is enough to

According to Reuters Digital News Report (2025) —which is supported by a lot of companies and countries— television broadcasting is slowly getting over. Younger generations are using social media to get news. Above the %50 percentage of 18-35 years old people uses social media to get news. Also, they do not prefer to use news web sites and applications. The rise of using social media may lead the way for the formation of a new political culture in the future.

Social media has a lot of opinion leaders, and this can lead to positive results as well as negative ones. People usually getting influenced by this opinion leaders. Parasocial interaction is a phenomenon about this topic. Also, parasocial selected the word of the year by Cambridge Dictionary and defined as involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence (Cambridge, 2025). People can become a rigid supporter of opinions due to the influence of opinion leaders or their echo chambers. And may polarize against opposing perspectives. Also, social media platforms can create their echo chambers. For instance, after the Elon Musk’s took over the Twitter (Now renamed as X) many more right-leaning people, notably young men, have flocked to the platform, while some progressive audiences have left or are using it less frequently (Reuters, 2025).

Role Of Social Media

Social media can effect almost everything. In this title we’ll examine the role of social media on different conditions such as conflicts, peacebuilding and politics. These roles defined with case studies.

Social media creates a new technique is used in conflicts such as Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT). OSINT basically uses people’s data that lives in websites. Some military personnel are posting on social media in a way that can be reveal that their location. Ordinary people probably cannot understand the danger of this post. Bu the real meaning is they showed their military base location. The support of the advanced algorithms the place can be detected. In Türkiye 2024, government take a decision to ban TikTok or other social media platforms for military people (Resmî Gazete, 2024). And the main reason of this banishes, OSINT or other types of new intelligence methods.

Also, just a few random people can locate a military base or driveway for military. The advanced technologies give a chance to change world. Nowadays, the intelligence services can locate it anywhere that shows. This is a new phase of war. In today’s world the war is not just perform at field, air or water. The new area is digital world. Every service has data on internet, lots of people uses internet to shop, almost everyone has and digital footprint (Vishwasrao, 2023). Every system links each other through to internet and if internet access will be damaged, basically daily life is over. People adopted the new real and this is a danger for improper uses of technology.

Case Study: Colombian Peace Referendum

In 2016 Colombia has a referendum for peace agreement with state and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerillas. This roots of this conflict dates to 1948-1958 period that known as La Violancia which is a civil war for Colombia (Feldman, 2017). After many years Colombian government aimed a final agreement for peace which is concludes constitutional right and rural reform, political participation, reincorporation of the FARC into civilian life, fight with drug problems, monitoring systems (Government of Colombia & FARC-EP, 2016).

The final agreement establishes a comprehensive legal framework for peace. However, the process changed with the decision to put the agreement to referendum. The opinion polls for the referendum predicted yes win about 66 percent (The Guardian, 2016). But it didn’t happen.

Regarding the Prof. Oscar Palma (Personal Meeting, 2025 December 22), social media created a gap between urban, countryside and rural areas. Social media differenced this sides and created false narrative also social media platforms like YouTube and WhatsApp played an active role about this. WhatsApp groups created discourses and which people who does not seen a war believe these narratives. Urban people get influenced by these false narratives and they believed it.

False information about gay rights framed the peace agreement as a threat to traditional values. Regions that had experienced war mostly approved the peace treaty (BBC, 2016), while regions that had not experienced war were influenced by the social media as mentioned early. As a result, the treaty proposal was rejected with 50.2% of votes. This case demonstrates how social media can undermine peacebuilding by amplifying emotional, identity-based narratives that override empirical experience and knowledge.

Case Study: Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

October 7, 2023, the war between Palestine and Israel is begun with attack of Hamas. However, we cannot fully characterize this war as having begun on October 7. In historical context, Israel and Palestine has been at war almost continuously since its founding. So, we cannot describe the roots of conflict is dated to October 7. All that aside, the main objective is impact of social media on this war.

Social media has a side that opens for bottom-up interactions. Everyone can post and be there. However, people who lives in Palestine created the renewed version of “living room war”. Palestinian people create videos about how they live, what they eat, what they want and much more (Awwad & Toyama, 2024). Along with the internet everyone can access the Palestinian POV’s. The importance of this effort is creating a public opinion to pressure for peace. The new narrative comes from different apart, in directly Palestinian peoples’ eyes. We can see literally how bad the conditions and more.

Also, this type of efforts creates a new way for monitoring. As we examined in Sudan example, now we are monitoring human right interceptions (Zhang & Vos, 2014), ceasefire interceptions and more on via social media or other platforms. The mobilization speed of new media grants a new version of monitoring and reducing costs of observing.

Palestinian narrative getting strong with social media campaign such as hashtags, donations, social initiative campaigns and boycotts. In the beginning of war lots of states stands with Israel (The White House, 2023) also various segments of the population indirectly affected by this behavior. But in the ongoing process people slowly changed their mind. The events in Palestine had a deep impact on people.

According to a public opinion poll conducted in the United States, the number of Americans who believe Israel is going too far against Hamas is increasing every year (Pew Research Center, 2025). The views of many Americans on this issue have been shaped by active use of social media, also the share of the budget allocated to Israel is one of the reasons for this, because of the economic needs of society (L. Rerer & R. Igielnik, 2025). These changes highlight how can social media change the public opinion for peace and reorganizes against conflict.

Case Study: Domestic Politics

In 2023 Turkish Elections, an example of a bottom-up approach has been shaped. Some social media posts might be turn into a trend and become a situation that sweeps society along with it. Political mobilization shaped by social media. This case exemplifies how decentralized digital participation can temporarily or permanently reshape political visibility without direct involvement from traditional media elites or party organizations.

According to survey companies, İnce had increased his percentage of the vote to between 6% and 10% on March 2023 (Bianet, 2023). One of the main reasons for this increase was due to an edited video of İnce's dance that spread on social media. This dance went viral and many people followed the trend. Also, other effects like İnce’s earthquake speeches got edited and they also became popular. Remarkably, this trend did not originate from political elites, campaign strategists, or mainstream media outlets. Rather, it emerged organically through a collective of online content creators. These user generated edits rapidly spread across platforms such as TikTok and X, mobilizing especially younger voters. This dance viral discussed in social media with numerous social media user imitations and widespread.

This case demonstrates the limitation of bottom-up approach. Despite the massive online visibility, İnce was unable to transform this digitally driven momentum into sustained organizational support or electoral consolidation. Later than İnce announced his withdraw from the election.

The İnce case highlights the critical paradox of New Media Effect. While social media creates a massive online visibility, it does not automatically produce long term political power. Digital popularity still needs capacity to strategic coordination. Nevertheless, this case highlights how social media can temporarily disrupt traditional political hierarchies and redefine agenda-setting processes during electoral periods. However, as seen in some cases, digital popularity that when it comes with strategic planning, it can produce very successful results.

By contrast, Zohran Mamdani’s electoral campaign in New York City demonstrates how digital mobilization can be translated into tangible political success when combined with strategical planning (The Guardian, 2025).

Future With New Media Effect

The historical context of media effects on politics has reached today by continuously improving itself. Also, this rise has been achieved by building upon the shortcomings of each previous attempt. Maybe the next step forward will be improvements in areas where today's social media failures, such as fact checking, which is likely to happen with artificial intelligence (AI). But in the other hand AI might be create technological monopoly on fact checking missions which like a gatekeeper. The effects of this could also result in mass control at much higher levels.

With the development of AI, the possibility of producing international problems has also rising. An incident that occurred in late 2025 led to a minor international crisis. Fake news created by AI spread on Facebook that claiming there had been a coup in France, and some heads of state and government officials who believed this called Macron and spoke with him (Euronews, 2025).

As we discussed the effects of New Media such as social media can determine whether it influences domestic politics as much as it does foreign relations. As a result of New Media effect states wants to be in social media platforms. Calls to join the army, which were made with posters in the last century, are now made with viral videos on social media (DW, 2025).

Also, we cannot apart from the social side of social media. Nowadays, about 4.5 billion people uses social media actively. Result of that many people can effects through social media. In other words, even though we may think about this in extensive terms, it shows that people influencing each other is a human factor that should not be overlooked. Living under an anonymous identity, becoming part of a movement through social media, and being influenced by parasocial interaction can lead to very different outcomes.

Conclusion

The New Media is becoming a political actor in these days. But the most important part is how we can use the New Media as a political actor. In case studies we observed that it possesses characteristics that vary from case to case. So, even if we are not entirely certain about what they are capable of, can we still consider them a political actor once again? It will be possible to say yes to this, since it is not possible to speak of general certainty in the social sciences. New Media can affect almost every aspect of social and political life for instance, videos that appear simple on social media can either positively impact a country's image and increase tourism revenue, or conversely, have the opposite effect.

New media, despite all its negative aspects, also has aspects that allow us to look to the future with hope. In addition to reducing the costs of global diplomacy, it also greatly facilitates and creates an environment for the implementation of peace missions. As well as persuading people and leaders to hold peace, it also serves as a bridge between people by hosting a global cultural exchange. So, with all this reconciliation, perhaps we can be in a better position for peace than before.

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