Inside PBS Blog

At their best, social networks can help change the way people think and act. But can social technology really help prevent something as serious and intractable as genocide?

The Genocide Intervention Network thinks so. The Washington D.C.-based non-profit relies heavily on social media sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, and YouTube to reach the young people who are their core supporters.

In less than two years, the organization has grown from a coalition of small student groups to a national non-profit, in part by leveraging the power of social networking. It now has members at more than 300 colleges and 200 high schools across the country.

"Our interest in social networking started mostly out of necessity," writes Ivan Boothe, the group's director of communications. "Students and young people have been at the forefront of the anti-genocide movement, and they were self-organizing using MySpace and Facebook. So using these social networking tools was a matter of catching up."

GI-Net relies leans heavily on Facebook and MySpace to help spread the word. The group has set up extensive group profiles on both sites, where it posts the latest news and links to current campaigns. The group uses Facebook's messaging service and MySpace's blog and bulletin features to adapt the action alerts into shorter, punchier versions that are then seen by all of the network's "friends."

The group also uses social networking to call its members to action. A targeted campaign of Facebook messages in Indiana netted a large number of students willing to call Sen. Richard Lugar's top donors (a list of which was uploaded from opensecrets.org) and ask them to pressure the senator to approve a bill on Darfur he was holding in his committee.

In another clever leverage of social networking, GI-Net members also contribute regular updates and edits to the Wikipedia entry on Darfur. The links to the group's website that appear in the Wikipedia entry generate nearly half of all of visitors from other sites.