Abstract:

Facebook is the dominant digital public sphere in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) is amongst the country’s most serious forms of collective violence. This article presents the first systematic empirical analysis of how the two intersect. We draw on 507 posts from 24 public pages and groups collected between 2013 and 2024. Posts were coded for stance and analysed using Firth logistic regression and structural topic modelling, supplemented by qualitative analysis of two high engagement comment threads. We find an apparent paradox. Public-facing Facebook discourse is overwhelmingly anti-SARV: 83 per cent of posts oppose the violence. Yet this apparent consensus is largely produced by a relatively small group of high-volume government, NGO and advocacy actors, rather than reflecting the distribution of opinion amongst Facebook users more generally. Stance also varies significantly across actor categories, with church pages in our dataset markedly less likely to produce oppositional content, despite strong church opposition to SARV offline. At comment level, discourse is considerably more contested. A particularly important position accepts the reality of sorcery while rejecting violence against accused persons, complicating any advocacy approach that would assume disbelief in sorcery to be a necessary basis for opposing SARV. Across the dataset, Facebook emerges not simply as a medium through which harmful narratives circulate, but simultaneously as an incident-reporting system, advocacy infrastructure, a stage for official public statements and an arena for public debate. These findings demonstrate the importance of distinguishing institutional messaging from audience discourse and suggest that effective digital strategies against SARV must engage seriously with the plural religious, cultural and epistemological frameworks through which sorcery and violence are understood.