Elections

PoliDashboard is an app for tracking political advertisements on Meta-owned advertising platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. It is designed to help voters, journalists, campaign staffers and others to track the use of targeted ads around social issues, elections or politics. The data is automatically updated every day via the Facebook Ad API and is developed by the Social Media Lab based at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Leading up to and following the Kenyan election on August 9 2022, the Sentinel Project is expanding its previous work in the area, from Una Hakika to 15 of Kenya's highest risk counties. The project is monitoring, verifying, and countering the spread of harmful rumors and misinformation, and setting up an early warning system for violence.

Within the disinformation and memory studies direction, the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) team is developing tools in several ways. Firstly, IDFI research historical roots and disinformation narratives that are weaponized in contemporary times. Secondly, IDFI develops academic courses that are offered to the students in schools of media and social sciences, and to representatives of CSOs and civil servants.

A live dashboard analyzing the top German candidate's presence on multiple social media platforms. The website highlights posts published by the candidates themselves and posts made about the candidate by the general public. In-depth analyses will be published as the campaign period continues until October 2021.

A user guide for civil society organizations and researchers to assess the vulnerability of a country’s electoral integrity to online manipulation. It also provides strategies for both parties to assemble reports based on a standard methodology and comparable datasets. 

A report analyzing the online environment and potential risks for the 2021 German Federal Elections. It studies topics ranging from online advertising, hate speech, disinformation and foreign interference. The end of the report provides recommendations for improvements and regulations in each category. 

Name It. Change It releases research projects and studies demonstrating gender-based challenges women face from the media when they run for office. In the past, they have published studies revealing where voters saw the most media sexism during the 2016 elections and conducted surveys on media coverage of women candidates’ appearance. The results of these reports continue to raise awareness about this growing issue and support their guides on best practices for gender-neutral coverage of women candidates. 

This working group for electoral management bodies was established to tackle challenges presented by social media and disinformation to the electoral process in May 2021. With nearly 50 election officials from 13 countries in the Eastern Partnership and Western Balkans, the group provides EMBs a platform for continued peer learning, skill-building, and developing best practices.  

This Code of Conduct was published to address the issues of election transparency and disinformation in the digital sphere. This code requires transparency regarding the sender, costs, and reach of advertisements during the election campaign. It also urges political parties to avoid posting misleading messages or accept foreign funding for advertising. 

Nepal’s Election Commission published their electoral code of conduct in 2015, which established standards and regulations for various institutions, persons, bodies and authorities. The code includes language for the mass media in preventing the publication, broadcast, or dissemination of “baseless information in favor of or against candidate or political party on electronically used social networks such as S.M.S., Facebook, Twitter and Viber”. Clauses such as these work to ban deliberate sharing of fake news during Nepal’s election period.