New project: Platform Policies and Elections

It’s a real treat, as a researcher, to get funding to work for several years on an important project with excellent colleagues. So, I’m delighted that our team at the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions has launched a new, multi-year investigation of the policies that governments and social media platforms have introduced to protect the integrity of democratic elections.

This issue leapt onto the global stage, and my own research agenda, in the aftermath of the 2016 elections in the UK and US. Not only did these give us Brexit and President Donald Trump, they felt like the first elections in which social media played a decisively negative role, from Russian interference to Cambridge Analytica’s data theft and opinion manipulation to industrial volumes of “fake news.” Since 2016, it’s become clear that bad actors were indeed leveraging platforms to promote false information, widen social cleavages, and drown out legitimate and productive democratic discourse (as Spencer McKay and I wrote about in Political Research Quarterly). However, subsequent research revealed that the election outcomes themselves – and broader issues of social polarization – were driven by a wide set of forces. The platforms were both a mirror and an accelerant of those trends.

Democratic governments reacted with inquiries and heated criticism of the tech industry, but actual legislation to address platforms’ roles in harming democratic processes and discourse has come in fits and starts. Heidi Tworek, Fenwick McKelvey and I had a front row seat for those developments in Canada. After publishing the Poisoning Democracy report with the Public Policy Forum, we and other experts convened and were consulted by government officials as they developed security policies and updated Canada’s elections laws in advance of the 2019 federal elections. It was interesting to see how academic and civil society voices contribute to this flurry of discussion, while the federal government was testing ideas and drafting new policies. I was also watching policy developments beyond Canada’s borders, and I tracked some of these in a 2020 article in The International Journal of Press/Politics, Protecting Democracy from Disinformation: Normative Threats and Policy Responses.

However, 2023 feels like a new era for social media platform regulation, with Europe’s Digital Services Act, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, and potential new online harms legislation in Canada.

What impact will those and other developments have on how social media platforms are used and misused in elections? How do these developments in North Atlantic countries compare to or shape policy trajectories elsewhere, as countries try to wrest control of their digital public spheres from US-based corporations, often doing so with measures that simultaneously increase sovereign control and threaten rights to freedom of expression.

There’s a daunting range of issues to contemplate as we begin this project on social media regulation and democratic elections. Thankfully, I’ll be coordinating a fine group of people.

Heidi Tworek is the PI of a new SSHRC Insight Grant that is providing the core funding for the project, A Global Comparative Study of Policies to Protect Democratic Participation on Social Media Platforms. Our key collaborators are:

• Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser University
• Elizabeth Dubois, University of Ottawa
• Ivar Hartmann, Insper Institute of Education and Research, Brazil
• Christian Katzenbach, University of Bremen, Germany
• Molly S. Laas, Social Science Research Council, USA
• Emily Laidlaw, University of Calgary
• temi lasade-anderson, King’s College London, UK
• Jonathan Corpus Ong, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
• Taylor Owen, McGill University
• Yves E. Tiberghien, University of British Columbia

Onward!