Facebook joins Stanford University project "Peace Innovation;" Facebook tracking connections between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Facebook social networking site has joined a Stanford project encouraging online organizations to share the impact they are making on peace.
Answering the call of a Stanford University project called “Peace Innovation,” Facebook started tracking connections made between Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, and Albanian and Serbian members of the social networking website.
According to Facebook’s numbers (available at peace.facebook.com) , 18,624 online connections were made between Israelis and Palestinians in 24 hours alone, as of Saturday afternoon.
The Stanford initiative, launched by its Persuasive Technology Lab, was created to encourage organizations to set up a subdomain on their website in order to share their work that “increases peace,” according to its website. Facebook is one of 52 participating websites listed on the Stanford project’s page.
The social networking site was providing statistics for connections made by its members across geographical, religious and political cleavages.
It listed 738 Sunni-Shi’ite connections, nearly 96,000 Christian-Muslim connections and nearly 1,000 Jewish- Muslim connections in the 24 hours.
Although there is a large discrepancy between the number of Israeli-Palestinian connections and Jewish-Muslim connections, one possible explanation is that not every member of the social networking site lists their religion.
Also on the Peace subdomain, Facebook presented results of a daily poll it gives its members, asking, “Will we achieve world peace within 50 years?” According to a graph provided, over 20 percent of Israelis answered yes to the question.
US Facebook users were the most pessimistic about world peace, with only 9% responding affirmatively compared to over 25% in Egypt, over 14% in Turkey, over 10% in Germany, and around 15% in Taiwan.
Of the countries listed, Colombians were the most optimistic, with over 30% answering positively.
http://www.jpost.com/Sci-Tech/Article.aspx?ID=198950&R=R1
