<aside> 💡 The Phoenix platform can be used to answer many different kinds of questions relevant to peacebuilders and mediators. You can use Phoenix to do a quick snapshot analysis of one piece of misinformation. You can use Phoenix to track trends in narratives about a conflict dynamic over a period of time.

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To make sure you are focused on the most relevant questions, we recommend you define a problem statement that guides the entire social media listening process.

Start by clarifying the overall objective of the analysis.

• Are we looking to understand what is being said on social media about a topic or topics (e.g. a group of people or an event or a political issue)?
• Are we trying to understand what a group of people (e.g. youth groups or journalists) share on social media about?
• Are we interested in a problematic behaviour on social media (e.g. intimidation, hatespeech, harassment)?
• Or some combination of the above… e.g. a problematic behaviour that happens when certain groups of people talk about certain topics

Some examples of an overall objective:

<aside> 📝 Conduct a mapping of online hate speech occuring at the local level in Coastal and Northern Kenya, understand who is using the language and to what end.

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<aside> 📝 Conduct social media monitoring in Tanzania, specifically the Mtwara region, around violent extremism narratives, to evaluate the impact of different (positive and negative) narratives on communities.

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<aside> 📝 Understand how Yemenis are expressing ethnic and religious identities on social media.

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Once you have defined an overall objective, identify specific research questions. Some examples of questions you might want to ask:

• How big is this narrative? What sub-topics does it have? How are topics connected?
• Who is talking about what? Who are the main influencers? How are people connected?
• What is being said or done that would signal a problematic behavior? How widespread is this behavior and who is most likely to engage in it? What else is being said or done connected to this?

<aside> ➡️ Want to read more on problematic behaviors on social media? Check out this paper we wrote about our internal reflections on this.

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