George Fox’s enduring call in 1656 for people to be ‘patterns and examples’ clearly didn’t encompass social media platforms.  Yet are Quakers today called to ‘walk cheerfully’ across the world of social media too?

To understand just how central social media is to humanity, I did a quick internet search.  In January 2025,  a vast 94% of all internet users, that’s 63% of the world’s population,  used one or more social media platforms?  Wow!   

I’m a social media user. Statistically, you probably are too. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and others can seem the only practical way to find out about events, enjoy group spaces with like-minded others, and keep in touch with distant friends and loved ones in today’s fast-moving society.  And we humans are hard-wired for connection.

Our natural human instinct for connection is believed to have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.   Collaborative hunter gatherers flourished, handing down co-operative genes.  It is an instinct hard-wired into our DNA but now submerged under societal norms: children learn to argue, to take sides, to label others as wrong, themselves as right. These disconnecting social behaviours were doubtless around in Fox’s time yet what has changed is that such behaviours are now actively leveraged by social media designers.    

If you’ve considered deleting your social media account, exhausted by argumentative online behaviour and aggressive trolls, you are not alone!  Yet those of us who ‘Peace Troll’ view these disconnecting social media behaviours as an opportunity!    

Being a’ Peace Troll’ is a new concept.  The vision is to role model an alternative nonviolent way of interacting, connecting with ‘that of God’ in the other. In place of taking sides, Peace Trolls seek to realign social media interactions to activate that common co-operative instinct that enables humans with differing views to connect, a grassroots movement to reclaim social media platforms as spaces for collaboration across difference.      

A check of how social media is currently set up evidences how platforms are designed to exacerbate arguments.  Content that provokes moral outrage and intense emotion, particularly anger, is highly effective at driving engagement.  Polarisation gets strategically monetised.  Algorithms amplify existing tensions, echo chambers keep us isolated, enhancing a binary understanding that our way is the right way, others are just plain wrong.     

These strategies subvert the very principles of collaboration that guide civil society.  Our trust in others reduces.  Online group conflict spreads into offline communities. The fabric of our communities is poised to unravel.   But this is where Peace Trolls enter. 

Peace Trolls respond to violent language with genuine connection.  The vision of the Peace Troll Movement is simple: social media platforms will become interconnected webs of good-natured connection, stretching between every home across the globe.  Threads where verbal aggression lurks will be ‘infected’ with nonviolence, not by agreeing with the other person or  keeping silent, instead by choosing to honour the common humanity of each person they respond to whatever their belief.  A reminder that collaboration is a practical principle to live by.      

Peace Trolls choose not to take sides.  Instead, in just 10 minutes a day, waiting for the school pick-up, in the supermarket queue, while dinner cooks, we respond to comments which might expect a hostile response.   We interact using the five evidence-based alternative SOFNR or ‘softener’ behaviours, derived from the nonviolent communication research of psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, and put argumentative right/wrong behaviours aside.

To understand the effect of Peace Trolling, let’s view some actual responses from initially incendiary commenters:

• John (Political debate, Facebook) “I’m the same. I don’t even know that we see things differently. You seem to want the same things I do.”
• Red Robyn (Vax debate, Twitter). “I just found this person. And whilst I may disagree with her on division being a bigger issue than disease, I’m going to try to do better. We could do with more peace spreading here.” 
• Slippery Gaming (Twitter).  “Thank you, sorry I wasn’t nice. I grew up on social media (that’s my excuse) so could do with some softening around the edges!” 

Peace Trolls’ responses impact others who read the thread too:    

• Ruth (Facebook). “You are role-modelling some good stuff – thanks for reminding me that it is possible to refute a point with grace.”

Fox enjoined his followers to ‘Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people and to them: then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.’

Has the belief that ‘aggressive language is just the way social media works these days’ become your own mantra? Or is there another way to view it?

As we enter the 2^nd quarter of the 21^st century, are Friends called to walk cheerfully and answer that of God in commenters whose co-operative instinct has been submerged under aggressive behaviour?  When such individuals sense they are  fully ‘seen’, the feelings and needs that drive their view of the world honoured, there’s a palpable spiritual energy in the connection.     

Will you consider responding with SOFNR habits next time you find yourself reactive, poised to be argumentative within a social media thread? Empowering random strangers online to speak of their needs without being told they are wrong has a spin-off too.  As you practice of SOFNR online, you will likely find real-life interactions become more co-operative too. It turns out social media is a great practice ground for relationship!        

Social media platforms have the potential to be an extraordinary global conduit for nonviolence.    

You aren’t powerless.

You can work directly for World Peace.  

All it takes is ten minutes a day.