RAPID: Immediate Social Media Data Collection in Key Election Contexts

Elections pose a critical challenge to the security and trustworthiness of cyberspace. Coordinated information operations and online organization of political violence during elections threaten the integrity of a wide range of democratic countries. We lack comparable cross-national data that can help us to understand how these threats operate across countries, and how political institutions, cyber-infrastructure, and socio-economic context shape such threats.

We also lack comprehensive data about candidate social media behavior. This project will dramatically increase scholars' access to data on electoral candidates' social media behavior and how voters respond to this behavior. This work will allow currently impossible investigations of how false information travels online during electoral campaigns and how such information affects beliefs of average voters across a range of polities facing different stages of democratic expansion.

These data can also inform governments interested in securing their elections and can assist social media firms in understanding how their platforms are used during campaigns.

This project is focused on building a data resource for scholars from social media data collection surrounding upcoming elections in polarized, democratizing, and otherwise relatively unstable contexts. The research team is purposively sampling election contexts of candidate social media data collection that meet objective criteria based on their level of democracy, polarization, stability, and cyber infrastructure.

Across all of these contexts, the research team is compiling social media candidate data, including candidate (public) social media accounts, publicly available candidate background characteristics, and other variables capturing the national, election, and seat(s) context. In three of these contexts, the research team is executing a survey among voters, collecting data on voters' ability to access candidates' online messages, voters' attitudes towards candidates' social media activity, the extent to which candidates mobilize offline political activity (including election violence) through digital networks, how commonly and effectively politicians spread disinformation using online platforms, and voters' perceptions of the security and stability of political cyberspace in their context.

The research team is developing training in the form of webinar series for graduate students in political science, public policy, and cybersecurity to encourage multi-disciplinary research using the data.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.