About Us
In the heart of the nation's capital, IDDP brings together top researchers from across academic disciplines, works side-by-side with and informs journalists from leading media outlets, advises and helps agenda set with policymakers in the U.S. and Europe, and engages with a variety of organizations that have significant societal influence and reach.
This work is of vital importance in an age when media manipulation, fake accounts, and malicious social media activities are undermining fundamental aspects of societal cohesion and democratic ideals. Abuse, harassment, hate speech, and disinformation abound, with foreign and domestic actors alike taking advantage of key features of digital platforms to target vulnerable and marginalized members of society.
What We Do
Research
Institute researchers produce timely publications about the threat to democracy posed by digital propaganda and deception and contribute to academic journals with new scholarships.
Convene
The Institute brings together a team of leading interdisciplinary researchers from around the world under one roof and organizes events on new disinformation research.
Educate
The institute collaborates with the Poynter Institute and its PolitiFact project to offer trainings on the misinformation landscape and how to correct false information with fact-checking journalism.
Network Modeling
Mapping the structure of digital networks and online group relationships.
Investigations
Conducting research on specific cases of pernicious content to help produce high-impact news articles.
Meaningful Opensource Indicators (MOSI)
Developing computational tools for identifying and analyzing harmful content and its producers.
Mis/disinformation lab
Developing computational tools for identifying and analyzing harmful content and its producers.
Public Health and Governance
Conducting multidisciplinary research into the health and societal consequences of platform policies and behaviors.
Towards Statistical Foundations For Detecting Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior On Facebook
In this document the researchers propose a novel method to detect coordinated inauthentic behavior in Facebook pages and groups. This method modifies a recently published technique, with the intention of establishing a firm statistical foundation for defining “simultaneous link sharing” behavior.
A New Wave of Research on Civilizational Politics: What Civilizations Are, What Explains Them, and Why They Matter – CORRIGENDUM
A new wave of scholarship has made major advances in how we understand the politics of civilizational identity by drawing powerfully from conceptual tools developed over the years to study other forms of identity.
Predicting Directionality in Causal Relations in Text
In this work, the researchers test the performance of two bidirectional transformer-based language models, BERT and SpanBERT, on predicting directionality in causal pairs in the textual content. The preliminary results show that predicting direction for inter-sentence and implicit causal relations is more challenging. And, SpanBERT performs better than BERT on causal samples with longer span length. The researchers also introduce CREST which is a framework for unifying a collection of scattered datasets of causal relations.Home page - events - title
The Conservative Dilemma
Monday, May 3, 2021 - 12:30pm to Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - 2:00pm
The Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics and the Social Science Research Council’s Media & Democracy program invite you to join them for The Conservative Dilem
Tech Policy Webinar Series: AI Fairness & Transparency
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 - 1:00pm
Tech Policy Webinar Series: Regulating Digital Platforms
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 - 1:00pm
Pop-up sites and door-knocking are new tactics in the quest to reach the unvaccinated
Now it’s all about the ground game. With more than 2.7 million Massachusetts residents fully vaccinated and the pace of COVID-19 shots slowing markedly, state officials are stepping up efforts to reach the holdouts.
Why Debunking Misinformation Is Not Enough to Change People’s Minds About Vaccines
One of the strongest underlying drivers that determines whether individuals or groups are vaccine confident or vaccine hesitant is the level of trust—or distrust—in the individuals and institutions that discover, develop, and deliver vaccines. “First Do No Harm”: Effective Communication About COVID-19 Vaccines
With effective COVID-19 vaccines in hand, we must now address the spread of information on social media that might encourage vaccine hesitancy.