Research Tools for Understanding Disinformation

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.

Radar is a project which uses a combination of algorithms and manual research to find posts related to three themes over a wide variety of social media platforms in Brazil. This allows Aos Fatos to map out the flow of disinformation and make predictions.

CivicSignal is Code for Africa's AI/machine learning initiative, using large-scale media monitoring to map the content/creator landscape and underlying business models for disinformation profiteers. Additionally, CivicSignal uses AI-driven language processing tools to analyze the underlying narratives that shape public discourse and perceptions and make the public vulnerable to disinformation and extremism. 
 

Communalytic is a computational social science research tool for studying online communities and discourse. This resource uses advanced text and social network analysis techniques to automatically pinpoint toxic and anti-social interactions, detect bots, assess posts’ sentiments, identify influencers, map shared interests and the spread of misinformation, and detect signs of possible coordination among seemingly disparate actors.

There are two versions:

Mnemonic is an NGO dedicated to archiving, investigating and memorializing digital information documenting human rights violations and international crimes. Mnemonic also provides trainings, conducts research, engages in content moderation advocacy, and develops tools to support advocacy, justice and accountability.

DisinfoWatch is a Canadian foreign disinformation monitoring and debunking platform. Data is sourced through an international network of journalists, civil society organizations, analysts, and automated sources. The core objective is to increase public understanding and awareness about mis/disinformation, by whom and why it’s produced, how to identify it and how to help stop its spread.

This new guide is designed to help democracy practitioners better understand social media trends, content, data, and networks. By sharing lessons learned and best practices from across our global network, we hope to empower our partners to make democracy work online by helping them:

• Collaborate with local, national, or international partners;

• Understand different methods of data collection;

• Make the best use of mapping and data visualization;

• Analyze the online ecosystem; 

• Detect malicious or manipulated content and its source; 

This tool offers an adaptable method to measure the gendered aspects and understand the drivers of this violence. It can be used by actors from across a range of professions who are concerned by hateful and violent speech online and are motivated to end it.

(Copied from website)

The global RTI Rating measures the strength of the legal framework for the right to access information held by public authorities (the right to information or RTI).

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The Youtube Dataviewer is a tool that allows users to extract metadata from Youtube videos. It allows users to track information such as original upload time of videos as well as running a reverse image search on all thumbnails used for videos, making it easier to see whether a video is actually relevant to the event people claim. To find the information, just copy and paste the URL into the dataviewer and search.

(Independently written)