Digital Threats to Democracy

Enhancing civic engagement, strengthening democracy, and monitoring elections. What role does social media play in elections? How can we identify and respond to hate speech and disinformation designed to undermine democratic practice? Can we build systems that enhance transparency and good governance? How can ICTs help promote an innovative and effective civil society?

We are inventing new theories, policies, software platforms, real-world processes to help identify, track, and respond to digital threats to democratic development. In particular, we focus on hate speech and disinformation during election periods in emerging and at-risk democracies. Our tools include new augmented AI systems to assist human trackers as they monitor multiple social media feeds in semi real-time.

In the last five years, we have focused our work on Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Myanmar. These experiences have led us towards a core set of findings and principles regarding social media monitoring, including that the popularity and importance of different social media platforms (e.g., X versus Facebook) vary over time and location; at the moment, both human and automated analysis is necessary; social election monitoring can complement and assist the work of traditional formal international and domestic observer missions; and identification of false reports online is as or more important than verification of true reports. This work has helped deepen our theoretical and practical understanding of the role of social media in political processes.