PeaceWorks Kansas City needs a social media guru who can help reduce the risk of a nuclear war by helping PeaceWorks supporters make better use of noncommercial social media to drive anti-nuke action.
In particular, PeaceWorks hopes to increase its effectiveness through more effective use of social media. This would include paying someone to help us gradually migrate to noncommercial social media like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Peertube and away from commercial social media that make money from amplifying political polarization and violence. It would include experimenting with different ways of messaging on different platforms and using that information to train our lead volunteers on how to better package their anti-nuke messages for maximum impact.
There is a substantial body of research that says that the increase in political polarization and violence worldwide in recent decades has been driven by increased concentration of ownership of the major media, especially commercial Internet companies like Facebook, to name only one.1 They are advertising companies. They make money from “engagement”,2 and “the shortest path to a click is anger or hate.”3 There is research that suggests that noncommercial social media is more likely to build bridges and less likely to strengthen walls between competing echo chambers.
By July 20 we need a brief bio with two very brief proposals by:
1. MAX: Peaceworks plans to apply for a grant “to Support Reducing Nuclear Dangers” from a consortium of philanthropies led by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with a deadline of July 31.4 Our tentative budget for this is $20,000 over two years to start in or shortly after October 2025 if we get the grant. Applicants should feel free to suggest larger or smaller budgets that would seem consistent with the suggested activities and bio.
2. MIN: If PeaceWorks does not get a Carnegie grant to do this, we may still want to do something in this area consistent with our more limited finances. Along with a “Max” proposal, please discuss what you think might be most effective in this area for, e.g., 10% of the “Max” budget.
If interested, contact
Spencer Graves <spencer.graves@effectivedefense.org>
Secretary, PeaceWorks Kansas City
m: 408-655-4567
Brief history of PeaceWorks Kansas City:
PeaceWorks Kansas City began in 1982 focusing primarily on reducing the risks of nuclear Armageddon. For most of the 40+ years since then, it has worked with a volunteer board with no paid staff. PeaceWorks Kansas City is an affiliate of the national Peace Action organization, one of the largest grassroots peace groups in the US. We are also affiliated with the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), and (in recent years) with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN, icanw.org).
The earlier years of our work were dominated by issues of nuclear weapons, excessive military spending. and unjustified wars. We are pro-peace and anti-war. In more recent years, PeaceWorks Kansas City has also spent time on several social justice issues jointly with other groups. For more on this, at pwkc.org, click, “Focus”, then “PeaceWorks Areas of Focus“.
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- Wikiversity, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Information_is_a_public_good:_Designing_experiments_to_improve_government), accessed 2025-07-09. ↩︎
- Wikiversity, “News from Germany 1900-1945 and implications for today” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/News_from_Germany_1900-1945_and_implications_for_today). ↩︎
- Wikiversity, “Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen says” (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Facebook_whistleblower_Frances_Haugen_says). ↩︎
- Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Call for Proposals: Grants to Support Reducing Nuclear Dangers” (https://www.carnegie.org/news/articles/call-for-proposals-grants-to-support-reducing-nuclear-dangers/). ↩︎